Wall Street Journal
By Alejandro Lazo
July 01, 2018
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court Friday on behalf of five detained immigrant children charges the Trump administration with unlawfully prolonging their detention in harsh conditions.
The complaint alleges the U.S. is detaining immigrant minors in overly restrictive detention centers, denying their release to family members or other custodians and improperly medicating the minors with psychotropic drugs. It also says the government is blocking their access to attorneys.
The suit, which seeks class-action status, was filed on behalf of minors from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico in various states of detention in the U.S.
The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.
The children are represented by the National Center for Youth Law and the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law. The organizations jointly filed a lawsuit in 1985 on behalf of immigrant children in detention that resulted in a longstanding federal court settlement, known as the Flores agreement, barring officials from detaining children when their parents are arrested for trying to enter the U.S. illegally.
Carlos Holguin, general counsel for CHRCL, a Los Angeles organization, said Friday in a call with reporters that the original Flores agreement was in “the crosshairs of this administration,” which was “seeking to erode or entirely abrogate the agreement as a whole.”
Part of the purpose of filing the new suit was to let the administration know the Constitution, as well as the Flores agreement, “prevent the government from abusing children,” he said.
The new case is significant because it seeks class-action status on behalf of migrant children in detention, while other actions have sought to enforce the previously existing Flores agreement.
Attorneys in Friday’s case made many of these claims in April, when they filed a motion in federal court asking a judge to enforce that settlement against the Trump administration.
Friday’s case makes new arguments based on the constitutional rights of the children, whereas much of the Flores case was based in child welfare jurisprudence.
The Trump administration last week asked a federal judge to change the Flores agreement so officials would be able to detain children alongside their asylum-seeking parents during immigration proceedings. The challenge came after Mr. Trump issued an executive order ending the separation of families at the southern border.
Justice Department officials had for weeks said the separations were unavoidable because the 1997 Flores agreement bars officials from detaining children when their parents are arrested for trying to enter the U.S. illegally.
In a filing in that case late Friday, the Justice Department said it planned to comply with the nationwide injunction by holding immigrant families together in spite of the decades-old federal court agreement that officials had previously said prevented them from doing so.
The department said it believed that, given the injunction, it could still be compliant with the Flores agreement and hold children with their parents for the duration of their immigration proceedings. But the Justice Department still insists the agreement needs to be permanently modified to prevent future problems.
The suit filed Friday names Alex Azar, the secretary of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and E. Scott Lloyd, the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, of HHS, as defendants. They are the heads of the departments charged with overseeing immigrant children held in federal detention.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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