No Jail for Child Immigrants

Safe Passage, September 8, 2015


From the Editorial section of the Miami Herald

…The Department of Homeland Security has been skirting the law by acting too harshly in treating children caught in the immigration snare at the border.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in California slammed DHS for its failure to uphold the terms of a 1997 court-ordered settlement governing the treatment of unaccompanied children — minors who tried to enter the country illegally without a parent. That settlement, which now also applies to immigrant children in detention who are accompanied by a parent, requires the rapid release of children and their parents caught crossing the border illegally. This is believed to affect roughly 1,400 children and their parents who are in detention awaiting asylum hearings.

An order by Judge Dolly M. Gee, of the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, also prohibited the administration from holding children in secure facilities that are not licensed to care for minors. The prisons to which these children have been transferred are run by private prison contractors, not by agencies licensed to care for children, as the legal settlement requires.

The federal judge also ordered the department to upgrade the “deplorable” conditions in its border stations, where the children are held at first, and said the new measures must be in place by Oct. 23.

When the administration balked, warning ominously of another flood of children at the border if they were released too soon, the judge labeled the reply “speculative at best and, at worst, fear mongering.”

The administration’s position has also been criticized by immigrant advocates and lawyers, as well as the American Bar Association, which said that prolonged detention of migrant families has been consistently rejected by the courts and damages their due-process rights of access to counsel…