19 states and the Columbia District Attorneys General sued the administration of President Donald Trump on Monday to block a sweeping new rule to detain permanently migrant families seeking to settle in the U.S.
The lawsuit has been lodged in the United States. The Los Angeles District Court was the first to take effect in October in an anticipated flurry of litigation trying to prevent the rule, formally released on Friday.
“This new Trump rule callously puts at risk the safety and well-being of children. It undermines a decades-old agreement reached in court by the federal government to prevent the unlawful detention of immigrant children,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in announcing the lawsuit.
On Monday night, the White House did not comment instantly.
The new law aims to scrap a 1997 agreement, known as the Flores settlement, which places a 20-day limit on how long children may be held in custody for immigration.
In 2015, the settlement was extended to apply not only to kids unaccompanied, but also to those traveling with their parents.
Trump administration representatives claim the detention boundaries have become a “pull” factor for migrants who hope that if they appear with a kid at the U.S .- Mexico frontier and ask for asylum, they will be permitted to attend a U.S. immigration court hearing, a practice called by the president, “catch-and-release.”
The attempts of the Trump administration to overthrow the settlement of Flores are likely to face more than just legal hurdles.
Even if the judiciary enable the new law to come into effect, practical issues also exist: paying for thousands of extra family detention beds.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only three family detention facilities — two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania — that have between 2,500 and 3,000 beds, Homeland Security Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan said in last week’s announcement.
Only last month, more than 42,000 families were detained along the U.S. southern frontier, mostly from Central America. The figures of July arrests are at record highs, although they have fallen by more than half compared to May rates.
“Even if the number of border crossings doesn’t go back up in the fall, all this (new rule) would enable them to do is to detain a relatively small percentage of the arriving families for longer,” said Kevin Landy, a former ICE assistant director responsible for the Office of Detention Policy and Planning under the Obama administration.
This practice is probable to proceed without more room, Landy said.
Shawn Neudauer, an ICE spokesperson, said the agency was unable to comment on prospective rises in the detention ability of the agency.
Congress mandates how much ICE can spend on immigration detention, and the budget for 2019 allocates $2.8 billion to pay for 49,500 single adult beds-but only 2,500 parents and children’s beds.
According to agency statistics, ICE is presently detaining more than 55,000 immigrants, a record high, a tiny proportion of them in family centres.
ICE also had difficulty finding communities ready to accept facilities building, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former U.S. policy advisor. Now at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, Customs and Border Protection.
It’s also unclear how the family detention law will function with another Trump administration strategy that will push Central American families back to Mexico to wait there for their U.S. court hearings, she said.