With all that is going on, the issue of family separations at the border has slipped from view. But, a new article in the current issue of The New Yorker about the gut-wrenching ordeal of 5-year-old Helen, an asylum seeker from Honduras who was taken from her grandmother by border patrol agents and later encouraged to sign away her rights to a court hearing, reminds us that since Trump halted the practice in June,
The family-separation crisis hadn’t been resolved, as many Americans believed—it had simply evolved.
Now, in a new development, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California has approved a settlement in a set of family separation cases.
One of the cases was Ms. L. v. ICE, which actually pre-dates the immediate family separation crisis. Ms. L and her 7-year-old daughter fled violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo—once deemed the rape capital of the world—but were eventually detained separately without explanation, 2,000 miles apart. The indomitable American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first brought suit in February on behalf of Ms. L. (The original complaint is here). At the time, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed it did not have a “policy” of separating mothers and their children, although they retained the right to do so to protect children from human traffickers. Ms. L was eventually reunited with her daughter, but the case was expanded in March to a nation-wide class action suit to cover all detained immigrant parents separated from their children. (The class certification motion is here). As such, the case continued under Ms. L’s name.
On June 26, Judge Dana Sabraw in the Southern District of California in San Diego granted the ACLU’s request for a preliminary injunction requiring that separated children covered by the class certification order be returned to their families within 14 days or 30 days depending on the ages of the children. He also ordered the Trump administration to stop deporting parents without their children. The Trump administration later admitted that it would need to miss these reunification deadlines. Surprisingly, the government did not immediately appeal these Temporary Restraining Orders (TROs) but rather sought a time extension to reunify the separated families. Sabraw refused to relax the original deadlines—calling them “firm deadlines” not just “aspirational goals”. The ACLU then sought a remedy for the government’s failure to meet the original July 10 deadline to reunite small children (under 5) with their parents.
Eventually, the government appealed the class-wide preliminary injunction to the 9thCircuit Court of Appeal. While the appeal was pending, however, a settlement was reached in September. It had to be approved by a judge per Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(e) to ensure it was in the best interests of class members. This has now occurred.
Read the full post at Just Security.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:10/16/2018