The Trump administration is finally getting back to one of its most basic principles, which is that anything it does to children of undocumented migrants is justified because after all they are ILLEGAL, not people, and that means anything goes. In a move that many have been expecting — because the bastards already tried it in his first term — Team Trump is trying to vaporize fundamental protections for the rights and safety of migrant children in federal custody, because having to provide basic food, water, shelter, and clothing is inconvenient.
Besides, basic decency goes against Trump’s larger goal of making the USA such a terrible place that no one will want to come here.
On Thursday, the Justice Department filed a motion asking a federal court to dissolve the “Flores Settlement Agreement,” the 1997 consent decree in a class-action case that requires the government to provide undocumented children in its custody with the most basic services and conditions. Edible, nourishing food, clean living spaces, toothbrushes and toothpaste, beds with actual blankets, not Mylar survival sheets. Luxuries like that.
The Flores Agreement (“FSA” in court shorthand) also requires that minors in immigration custody have access to lawyers and that court monitors be allowed to check the conditions in facilities holding them. Possibly most important after the basic food and shelter conditions, it requires that kids taken into custody at the border be moved from Border Patrol holding cells to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and that children then be released to the custody of a sponsor, usually a parent or other family member.
The DOJ asks the court to “terminate the FSA completely,” claiming that it has been an incentive for more immigration of families and unaccompanied minors, and that the policy has “prevented the federal government from effectively detaining and removing families” from the US. What’s more, it claims that the Flores Agreement is no longer needed because some of its protections have been written into statutes and regulations, and we all know how dedicated the Trump administration is to following the law.
Shorter version: The administration wants to be free of the court’s supervision under the Flores Agreement, because that’s one of the few things keeping it from doing whatever it wants. In a very telling line early in the motion, the DOJ gripes that the court has no business getting in its way, claiming that the federal court in Los Angeles needs to butt out because
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.
Trust them. They know what they’re doing. All too well.
Trying to eliminate the Flores Agreement is simply the latest in a string of actions the administration has taken to Get Tough on migrant kids, because what good is making life hell for undocumented people if you have to feed, house, and provide clothing for their children? The administration has already expanded family detention, and as the Guardian explains, even with the Flores Agreement in place, that’s turning out to be a nightmare, and now the DOJ wants a free hand to make it worse:
Immigration advocacy groups have alleged in a class-action lawsuit filed earlier this month that unaccompanied children are languishing in government facilities after the administration unveiled policies making it exceedingly difficult for family members in the US to take custody of them. The president and lawmakers have also sought to cut off unaccompanied children’s access to legal services and make it harder for families in detention to seek legal aid.
“Eviscerating the rudimentary protections that these children have is unconscionable,” said Mishan Wroe, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law. “At this very moment, babies and toddlers are being detained in family detention, and children all over the country are being detained and separated from their families unnecessarily.”
Again, that’s the idea: If only we can make people afraid of losing their children, maybe we can scare them from trying to come here. So what if it means a little generational trauma? Keeping America white justifies just about any degree of cruelty. And as anyone who’s seen a Dirty Harry movie knows, any rule that requires treating criminals as if they were human just encourages them to do more crimes, even when the criminals are toddlers and preschoolers. Trump supporters are very big fans of taking the gloves off and getting tough.
As we say, this wasn’t a surprise; Trump tried and failed in 2019 to nuke the Flores Agreement because it yearned to jail entire families while they wait years for an asylum hearing, and it made many of the same arguments back then. It was also widely condemned by anyone who heard that Trump wanted to deny toothbrushes and blankets to migrant children in our baby jails. All that’s changed is that everything else under Trump has become more authoritarian this time around, making it harder for everyone to keep track of which atrocious policy the administration is pursuing at any given moment.
The notion that the Flores Agreement is no longer necessary simply doesn’t hold water, particularly when you consider that it was needed even during the Biden administration, when immigrants rights groups sued last year to stop the Border Patrol from keeping families with kids penned up in open-air camps at the border — line the ones in the photo up top. And that “one district court located more than 100 miles from any international border” — presided over by US District Judge Dolly Gee, of the Central District of California, who has upheld Flores any number of times in the past decade — made the government knock it off.
So yes, we still very much need the Flores Agreement, although it’s unclear what will happen when this motion eventually gets to the Supreme Court. When Trump’s DOJ tried to kill off the consent decree in 2019, Judge Gee blocked it, and the appeal was only heard (and rejected) by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in December 2020, by which time Trump was preoccupied with trying to overturn the election.
So far, Flores has held up in the courts. Whether that remains the case is anyone’s guess. It’s one more atrocity we need to fight like hell, and let’s just hope that once more, it will turn out that Americans won’t stand for recordings of little children sobbing in detention.
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[Guardian / AP / Motion in Flores v. Meese / Children’s Rights.org]
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