California Leads Fight Against Plan to Hold Migrant Families Indefinitely
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Nineteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia, led by California, filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to stop a new policy the Trump administration announced last week, under which migrant families that crossed the U.S. border illegally would face indefinite detention. This approach—the latest step in the White House’s ongoing efforts to curb undocumented migration to the United States—is intended to replace a longstanding 20-day limit on keeping families in immigration jails.
The Trump administration has come under criticism for conditions in overcrowded detention facilities near the southern border and for separating thousands of children from their families.
Kristjen Nielsen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s secretary of homeland security, called the 20-day parameter a “legal loophole” that has allowed undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States illegally.
“Efforts to weaken or eliminate basic child protection standards by calling them a burden or loopholes, and eliminating their obligations for the basic care of children, is just another example of the administration’s abdication of human rights,” Michelle Brané, the director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, told the New York Times.
Why 20 days? In 1997, the U.S. federal government reached a settlement with Jenny Lisette Flores, a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador who was mistreated at the U.S. border. The agreement put in place a 20-day limit on the detention of children and set basic standards under which they can be held. But Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services have moved to terminate the settlement.
What can states do to overrule Trump? A multistate lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California asserts that the new rules violates the court-granted basic standards of protection for detained immigrant children. “Children have been forced to go without basic hygiene products that we all take for granted like soap and toothbrushes and they are being held in these conditions for much longer than is ever necessary,” said Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general. “Children don’t become subhuman simply because they are migrants.”
