After turning 18, federal judges have temporarily blocked new Trump administration policies to keep immigrant children in custody and quickly moved to halt relocation to adult facilities that advocates said were scheduled for this weekend.
On Saturday, US District Judge Rudolf Contreras issued a temporary restraining order to US immigration and customs enforcement agencies to prevent children who came to the country alone in an ice adult detention facility after becoming an adult.
A Washington, DC judge found that such automatic detention violated a court order in 2021 that banned such practices.
ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment Saturday.
Pushing to restrain new adults is yet another fight over one of the most sensitive issues on President Donald Trump’s hardline Immigration Agenda – How to treat children crossing borders that are not accompanied by adults.
The Associated Press reported Friday that authorities are offering immigrant children over the age of 14. $2,500 to voluntarily return to their home country. Last month, another federal judge blocked an attempt to deport him soon. Guatemala immigrant children Who came back to their home country and came to America. Some children were on planes during that late night surgery before the judge blocked it.
“All of these are part of the same general policy to force young immigrants to waive their right to seek protection in the United States,” said Michel Lapointe, a counsel for the American Council of Immigration, who was one of the groups who asked Contrera to intervene in shortly after midnight on Saturday.
Unaccompanied children are detained in shelters run by the Refugee Resettlement Office, not under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, not ice. Contreras’ 2021 order directed federal officials to release minors from 18-year-old minors to “the least restrictive setting available.” He determined that minors are required by federal law, unless they are risky and are not risky to themselves or others. Minors are often released to relative custody.
However, lawyers representing unaccompanied minors said in the past few days that ICE has told shelters that children about to turn 18 (even children who had already approved a approved release plan could no longer be released and instead were able to be taken to detention facilities on Saturday). One email from ICE argued that new adults could only be released by ICE under case-by-case parole authorities for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public interest.” From March to September, ICE released parole less than 500 people overall.
The plaintiffs alleged that “release of parole is everything except the dead letter” and that children aged from shelter would cause permanent harm from “unnecessary and inappropriate adult detention” in overcrowded or remote prisons. The plaintiffs said that this is especially true as some of the clients they cited were victims of human trafficking or were abused, abandoned or abandoned by their parents.
US border authorities have arrested children across borders and without parents more than 400,000 times since October 2021. The 2008 law requires that you appear before an immigration judge before being returned to the country.
Children have spent more time in government-run shelters, starting with the Trump administration putting them under closer scrutiny, then releasing them to American families and pursuing immigration cases.
Additional scrutiny includes fingerprints, DNA testing and home visits by immigration officers. During the summer, immigrants began to appear. Parents arrested.
The length of stay in a government-run shelter for those released in the United States is 171 days in July; 217 Days Peak It was April, but in January, when Trump took office, it was far better than the 37th.
