Federal judge rules US violates agreement in detention of immigrant kids

A federal judge has ruled that the US's current system of detaining children with their mothers after they've crossed the U.S.-Mexico border violates an 18-year-old court settlement.

|
Eric Gay/AP/File
Awoman uses the library at the Karnes County Residential Center, a temporary home for immigrant women and children detained at the border, in Karnes City, Texas in 2014. A federal judge has ruled that the US's current system of detaining children with their mothers after they've crossed the U.S.-Mexico border violates an 18-year-old court settlement.

A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice's current system of detaining children with their mothers after they've crossed the U.S.-Mexico border violates an 18-year-old court settlement.

The decision Friday by U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in California is a victory for the immigrant rights lawyers who brought the case, but its immediate implications for detainees were not yet clear. The ruling upholds a tentative decision Gee made in April, and comes a week after the two sides told her that they failed to reach a new settlement agreement as she'd asked for.

The 1997 settlement at issue bars immigrant children from being held in unlicensed, secure facilities. Gee found that settlement covered all children in the custody of federal immigration officials, even those being held with a parent.

Peter Schey, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and one of the attorneys who brought the suit, said federal officials "know they're in violation of the law."

"They are holding children in unsafe facilities. It's that simple," Schey told The Associated Press. "It's intolerable, it's in humane, and it needs to end, and end sooner rather than later."

Justice Department attorneys did not immediately reply to late-night messages seeking comment on the ruling.

The new lawsuit was brought on by new major detention centers for women and children in Texas that are overseen by the U.S. government but are managed by private prison operators. Together they have recently held more than 2,000 women and children between them after a surge of tens of thousands of immigrants from Central America, most of them mothers with children, many of whom claimed they were fleeing gang and domestic violence back home.

The Justice Department had argued it was necessary to modify the settlement and use detention to try to deter more immigrants from coming to the border after last year's surge and it was an important way to keep families together while their immigration cases were being reviewed, but the judge rejected that argument in Friday's decision.

Gee gave the Department of Justice one week to show cause why she should not enter an injunction that would require the government to comply with the ruling within 90 days.

But since the tentative ruling in April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has vowed to make the facilities more child-friendly and provide better oversight.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Federal judge rules US violates agreement in detention of immigrant kids
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0725/Federal-judge-rules-US-violates-agreement-in-detention-of-immigrant-kids
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe