Judge rejects Trump’s attempt to end standards of care for detained migrant children
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Miriam Jordan
A federal judge rejected late last week the Trump administration’s second attempt to end a decades-old legal agreement that mandates basic standards of care and oversight for children in U.S. immigration custody.
Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the Flores Settlement Agreement, in effect since 1997, must remain in place. Court-appointed monitors and lawyers will continue to have access to migrant children in border stations and family detention centers to ensure that the government is complying with the agreement.
The first Trump administration tried and failed in 2019 to dissolve the settlement agreement. And in a 20-page ruling, Gee criticized the government for trying again, even though, she wrote, “they point to no meaningful change either in factual conditions or in law since their last motion to terminate.”
Under the 1997 consent decree, migrants who are 17 and younger must be held in the “least restrictive” setting while efforts are made to expeditiously release them. The minors must receive adequate meals, clean water, clothing, education and medical assistance, among other basic needs.
The judge said that neither the Homeland Security Department nor the Department of Health and Human Services, which are responsible for migrant children, were in “sufficiently substantial compliance to warrant termination of the Flores Settlement Agreement.”
The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the Trump administration is expected to appeal the ruling again, setting the stage for the case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Leecia Welch, a lawyer with Children’s Rights who has for years interviewed children and parents in detention facilities, said that Friday’s ruling “comes as great relief.”
“Flores is the last line of defense against this administration’s plans to round up and detain children indefinitely in conditions no child deserves,” she said.
The government blames the Flores settlement for incentivizing parents to bring children so that they can be released quickly into the country.
In its motion, the administration said Flores had fueled unlawful border crossings by families and had hampered the government’s ability to effectively detain and deport families.
In her decision, the judge indicated that she was not persuaded by any of the administration’s arguments.
“Incredulously,” she wrote, government lawyers tried to argue that the “expeditious release” from detention under Flores was intended to apply only to children who enter alone and not to those who enter the country with their families.
“This is plainly incorrect,” she wrote.
In a motion filed in May, the Trump administration said that the Flores agreement was no longer necessary because Congress had enacted legislation and government agencies had established standards to guarantee proper care.
“The legal basis for the agreement has withered away,” the administration said, describing Flores as an “intrusive regime” that had “ossified federal immigration policy.”
“The Flores Settlement Agreement itself has changed the immigration landscape by removing some of the disincentives for families to enter the U.S. unlawfully,” the motion said.
Minors who cross the border are first held at Customs and Border Protection stations for processing. Those who arrive unaccompanied are then transferred to government-run shelters, where they remain until a relative in the United States can claim them. Children who arrive in the United States with family members are either released into the country with their parents or placed in family detention facilities while their immigration cases proceed through the courts.
Terminating the agreement would have eliminated independent oversight and left the government to monitor itself.
Lawyers representing the children argued that they could not trust the Trump administration to uphold standards that it had previously violated.
“Defendants demand release from the settlement not because they have complied with and will continue to observe its fundamental principles, but because they want the flexibility to treat children however they wish,” they wrote in court filings.
Preserving the agreement is “even more vital under this administration,” Carlos Holguin, lead counsel, who filed the lawsuit in 1985, said during a hearing last week.
Gee appeared to agree. She said it was contradictory that detention conditions were deteriorating, even as the number of border crossings had plunged — “unless it’s willful,” she told government lawyers.
Reports of unsafe and unsanitary conditions in border stations have mounted since President Donald Trump took office, according to court filings that have included firsthand accounts from children who described being confined for days in frigid, windowless rooms without access to showers, private toilets or the outdoors. Migrants are taken to the facilities for processing immediately after they are apprehended, and successive administrations have kept them there for no more than 72 hours, the judge said.
After recent visits to a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, lawyers reported inadequate medical care, stifling heat and limited access to recreation, as well as prolonged detentions, with no end in sight, that are taking a toll on mental health.