Border Patrol must care for migrant children it locks up, federal judge rules
Source: The Hill
04/04/24 1:38 PM ET
When the federal government locks migrants up, it’s responsible for them — whether or not they’ve been formally processed, a federal judge found on Wednesday.
As migrant crossings over the border between Mexico and Southern California have overwhelmed local detention facilities, thousands of people have been left to camp in the desert, often for days. In the case under dispute, Flores v Garland, civil rights groups sued on behalf of migrant children living in the camps, who they argued were being housed in “inhumane” conditions.
The U.S. Border Patrol largely didn’t challenge the idea that the conditions weren’t adequate. Instead, it argued that the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the agency on this issue, because the agency had not formally taken on responsibility for the children by processing them. Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court of Central California roundly rejected that idea.
The agency may not have intended for temporary camping sites to become polluted open air detention sites “collectively holding thousands of migrants,” Gee conceded. But she added that the situation has “evolved such that the minors held there” are in the agency’s legal custody — and therefore it is responsible to care for them. At the core of the present case is the 27 year-old decision in Flores v. Sessions, which established that the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for providing housing to “all minors who are detained in the legal custody” of the agency.
Read more: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4574773-border-patrol-must-care-for-migrant-children-it-locks-up-federal-judge-rules/
NOTE:The Flores settlement (1997) pre-dates DHS and had applied to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (now ICE, CBP & USCIS), where a suit was filed (and had an appeal in 2017) that became Flores v. Sessions (PDF) - https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2017/07/05/17-55208.pdf
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