More than 100 Democratic members from both the House of Representatives and the Senate have filed a legal brief calling on a top court to reject a Trump administration attempt to gut vital protections for migrant children in U.S. custody, warning that “In particular, the Regulations effectively authorize the indefinite detention of migrant children.”
While not perfect, the 1997 Flores Agreement improves the treatment of children, prohibiting the detention of kids for more than 20 days, “and, while they are detained, requires that they be treated with safety and dignity under basic standards of care,” immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice said last year. But in August, the administration announced a regulation to terminate the agreement, leaving advocates to fear kids could be returned to an era of “no schooling, no recreation, no doctors” while in custody.
A federal judge in September, thankfully, rejected the administration’s effort. In her decision, Judge Dolly Gee called the administration’s attempt to end this decades-old agreement, “Kafkaesque.” But the administration has continued its despicable mission to detain kids indefinitely, now going to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the legislators filed their brief urging the court to continue standing for the protection of vulnerable kids.
“The Regulations instead allow DHS to indefinitely detain children in its own facilities and to handpick the entities that inspect those facilities for compliance with INS standards,” the legislators said. “The Regulations thereby eliminate the assurance that the facilities housing these children satisfy state standards, and they deny the independent oversight of federal immigration detention facilities that is critical to maintaining the health and safety standards for migrant children that the Agreement guarantees.”
In just one example of the kinds of horrors that these crucial inspections have uncovered, attorneys made border officials hospitalize four severely sick toddlers—including a “completely unresponsive” girl who was so sick that her “eyes were rolled back in her head,” according to HuffPost—during one inspection of a McAllen, Texas, facility in June 2019. “It’s intentional disregard for the well-being of children,” attorney Toby Gialluca told HuffPost. “The guards continue to dehumanize these people and treat them worse than we would treat animals.”
When migrant children have languished and died in U.S. custody for the first time in a decade, these protections must stay in place, as the legislators urge (though it must be said that no detention at all is always in the best interests of kids). The full list of signatories, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Jeff Merkley, and Reps. Jerry Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Joaquin Castro, and Veronica Escobar, is available here.