Trump wages court battle over rules for detaining migrant children

Trump wages court battle over rules for detaining migrant children - Click here to listen to this article - Share via See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred - The Trump administration is seeking to scrap the Flores settlement, an agreement that sets rules for how migrant children can be held in detention. - The case has been appealed to the 9th Circuit, where Department of Justice lawyers have requested the court to ‘thumbs-up, thumbs-down’ the settlement. - Detained children and their parents have described struggling to sleep in freezing, brightly lit rooms, vomiting from spoiled food, and begging staff for basic supplies such as diapers and baby formula. For more than a quarter-century, a lawsuit settlement from a case brought in Los Angeles federal court has dictated conditions for children held in immigration detention. But now, the long-standing settlement — which set minimum standards for housing, education and medical care for migrant kids in federal custody, while strictly limiting how long they can remain there — hangs in the balance in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after a challenge by the Trump administration. At the same time, the federal judge in L.A. who presides over the agreement appears poised to appoint a powerful new enforcer to uphold it. President Trump has long sought to scrap the Flores settlement, which dates back to the Clinton era. In recent months, the Trump administration has waged a legal battle to cancel the agreement, while also pleading with the district court not to order an independent monitor to boost its compliance. “[Flores] is the only thing standing between them and indefinite detention of families,” said Leecia Welch, chief legal director at Children’s Rights, a plaintiff in the case. Last month, Assistant Atty. Gen. Brett A. Shumate pressed the 9th Circuit court to give the administration “the thumbs-up or thumbs-down” on its bid to tear up the settlement and end what he called “judicial micromanagement” of federal immigration policy. Nearly 600 immigrant children were held in a Texas detention center beyond court-mandated limits and without enough food or medical care, according to court data. “The Flores consent decree is an agreement which goes well above the constitutional floor,” Shumate told the court during oral arguments in June. “We’re asking that [the Department of Homeland Security’s] compliance with the law be assessed based on the law, not a 30-year-old settlement agreement.” The three-judge panel sharply questioned the Justice Department’s legal claims, saying little had changed since the government last petitioned the court to have the agreement dissolved in 2020 — a request that was rejected. The judges also pressed Trump administration lawyers to respond to evidence from scores of declarations filed in district court since last summer, in which detainees describe struggling to sleep in freezing, brightly lit rooms, vomiting from eating spoiled food, and begging for diapers, baby formula and asthma inhalers. “You’ve said a lot of the reason you’re doing this is to discourage families from coming in the first place, so you’re basically punishing children because their parents brought them here,” Judge Marsha S. Berzon said. Berzon, a Clinton appointee who issued a fiery dissent last year in a case that challenged the administration’s use of armed troops in immigration enforcement operations, asked: “You’re saying there’s no constitutional problem there?” “I understand the detention of children at the border is a controversial policy issue, but that’s a policy decision,” Shumate said. Just a day earlier, Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee scolded a pair of government attorneys from her bench in Los Angeles, signaling she would probably appoint a new special master to force compliance with the settlement agreement. “We’re talking about 11 years of this,” Gee said during the June 1 status conference. “None of these issues are new to me. These are all issues on which I have issued orders. I am very displeased about the fact that my orders are being disregarded and are not being complied with, not in good faith.” “Both sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality,” Gee said. The disputed settlement emerged from a 1985 lawsuit over the fate of 15-year-old Jenny Flores, a Salvadoran refugee who was picked up by federal immigration enforcement and left to languish in detention in Pasadena. At the time, there was little awareness that children were among the tens of thousands of migrants fleeing civil war and state collapse in Central America — with virtually no U.S. government infrastructure to protect them. “It was a surprise,” said Benjamin Roth, a professor at the University of South Carolina College of Social Work and an expert on the agreement. “There was no thought then that there were kids in this mix.” The current court fight centers on an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, run by the private prison company CoreCivic, where the vast majority of children and families in immigration custody are held. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released its first batch of detention data since early April. Detentions dropped after the raids intensified in January, but surged once again in June. In court filings earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has “maintained core Flores-related services” at Dilley and argued its length-of-stay numbers were skewed by a small number of families it was forced to keep because they are considered “national security risks.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection likewise boasted its July 1 report “shows our highest level of compliance to date.” Immigrant rights advocates called those claims “a fiction.” “We see the same sorts of problems and concerns and misery that we’ve been seeing for the last 15 months,” said Welch, the Children’s Rights attorney. In dozens of declarations collected as part of the court record, detainees recounted broccoli full of worms, diapers doled out one at a time, and staff tearing up children’s drawings. One mother said medical staff laughed off her 8-year-old’s broken arm. Another said she was denied treatment for hepatitis B, even after doctors told her she could develop liver cancer and pass the infection on to her unborn daughter. Still others described unexplained rashes, outbreaks of diarrhea and infestations of lice, among a host of other maladies for which many said they were offered only Tylenol or allergy medication. Even Christmas brought misery in the form of an ICE agent dressed up as Santa, who shoved away children trying to hug him, according to the detainee declarations submitted to the court. “What happened on Christmas Day can only be described as an atrocity,” one mother recalled. Children “dropped everything, ran up to him, begged for candy and wanted to take pictures. Some children even cried and begged him for their freedom. Santa himself acted very indifferent.” The Department of Justice argued that immigrant kids could still sue over poor conditions if the Flores settlement is unwound. But experts say existing protections would collapse without the legal architecture of the consent decree to support them. “[Under the settlement], the federal government has built out a very efficient system to provide temporary care for kids,” Roth said. “If Flores is dissolved, it’s not going to be easy to stand up this same set of programs.” If the Trump administration loses before the 9th Circuit, the fight over Flores could soon escalate to the Supreme Court. “I’d be shocked if the 9th Circuit rules for the government, and I’d be shocked if the Trump administration doesn’t appeal,” said Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University and an expert on the high court. The Justice Department has filed a first-ever petition to a secretive and dormant court created 30 years ago to weigh government requests to deport so-called ‘alien terrorists’ from the United States. But consent decrees are legally and politically complicated, and the treatment of migrant children further tangles the situation. Given the legal and political complexity, the Supreme Court could rule to keep the settlement in place, or decline to take the case at all, experts said. “It’s more likely than not the court would stay away from this,” Segall said. For now, both the district judge and the 9th Circuit panel appear fed up. “I think my patience has come to an end,” Gee said during the recent hearing in her Los Angeles courtroom.