The Trump administration on Thursday moved to terminate a longstanding court settlement that has obligated the U.S. government for nearly three decades to provide basic rights and services to migrant children in its custody.
Since 1997, the settlement, known as the Flores Agreement, has required federal U.S. immigration officials to hold migrant children in facilities that are safe and sanitary; provide them access to lawyers; and seek their expeditious release from government custody.
The legal agreement has also allowed lawyers to inspect detention facilities holding migrant minors, to determine whether conditions are adequate for children and that the government is complying with the provisions of the court settlement.
While the settlement initially largely only applied to unaccompanied minors, in 2015, U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee extended the protections to migrant children detained with their parents, generally limiting the detention of such minors to 20 days. The Obama administration fought that ruling, as it sought to deter migrant families crossing the southern border illegally by detaining them while their asylum cases were decided.
In a filing on Thursday, the Justice Department told Gee, who is based in Los Angeles, that the Flores settlement should be “completely” terminated. It argued the agreement has hamstrung the executive branch from effectively setting immigration policy and incentivized illegal border crossings by migrant families and unaccompanied minors.
“After 40 years of litigation and 28 years of judicial control over a critical element of U.S. immigration policy by one district court located more than 100 miles from any international border, it is time for this case to end,” the Justice Department said in its filing.
The Justice Department also argued that, through laws and government regulations, the government has codified some of the provisions of the Flores agreement.
Thursday’s move was not entirely surprising. The first Trump administration also tried to terminate the Flores agreement, making similar legal and political arguments against the settlement. But its efforts were blocked by Gee, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2009, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Justice Department on Thursday also asked Gee to lift a ruling that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing a 2019 regulation that would have allowed the government to detain migrant families indefinitely, bypassing her 20-day limit.
The Trump administration’s bid will be challenged by the attorneys representing migrant children covered by the Flores agreement, which they say is critical to ensuring those minors are treated humanely while in U.S. care.
“Eliminating the Settlement’s core protections would hand the government unchecked power to imprison children indefinitely in secret facilities — places with no standards, no transparency, and no accountability,” said Mishan Wroe, an attorney at the California-based National Center for Youth Law.
“The consequences are not hypothetical: children will suffer,” Wroe said.
