Texas Tribune by Emma Platoff Aug. 17, 2018
The Justice Department asked for the order to ensure that migrant parents who would otherwise have been detained can’t “bootstrap a right to release†just because they’re reunited with their children.
A federal judge says the government can now leave it up to immigrant parents: Keep your children locked up with you in an immigration detention center, or send them miles or states away to be cared for in a government-contracted shelter.
For months, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance†policy split parents and children who crossed the border illegally, inspiring a national backlash and, in June, a federal court order that migrant families must be kept together and that families who were already separated must be reunited.
But keeping all those families together presented a problem for the federal government: It can’t, under a longstanding legal constraint called the Flores settlement, detain children in immigration detention centers for longer than 20 days — far less than the months or years it can take to process an asylum case.
More than three weeks after the government’s deadline for reuniting thousands of families split at the border, it has begun to butt up against that 20-day restriction. And for now, the government is not permitted to deport reunited families — also the result of a court order this week.
The Thursday court order gives the government some measure of a solution to that dilemma: U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw has agreed that families can waive that 20-day right and other Flores guarantees, keeping their children with them in immigration detention centers. Or they themselves can choose to re-separate. That means the government won’t be forced to violate the Flores settlement as they wait for permission to deport some migrant families.
More:
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/08/17/reunited-migrant-separated-families-choose-ICE-detention/
