Judge Blocks Trump Administration Plan to Detain Migrant Children

LOS ANGELES — A federal judge on Friday rejected new regulations that would allow the government to hold children and their parents in detention for indefinite periods, one of the Trump administration’s signature efforts to curtail the large number of families arriving from Central America.

Describing the government’s defense of its proposed new policy as “Kafkaesque” in some of its reasoning, Judge Dolly Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California said it was up to Congress, not the administration, to supplant a 20-year-old consent decree that requires children to be held in state-licensed facilities and released in most cases within 20 days.

President Trump has repeatedly criticized the “legal loopholes” that he said force the government to engage in what he calls “catch and release” of migrant families who have been arriving, until recently, in record numbers on the southern border.

Under the 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores agreement, the government must seek to expeditiously release children from detention and maintain a number of minimal standards for them in secure detention facilities.

The agreement has its origins in a class-action lawsuit filed in 1985 against the federal government over its treatment of migrant children in detention, including a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl named Jenny Flores and a 12-year-old girl named Alma Cruz. In 1997, immigration officials in the Clinton administration agreed to settle the lawsuit, establishing standards for the detention of minors.

Flores lawyers have returned to court dozens of times in recent years to compel the government to abide by the settlement’s provisions, often after dispatching legal and medical teams to inspect conditions and interview children at detention centers.

Earlier this year, it was the Flores agreement that allowed lawyers in the case to visit overcrowded Border Patrol facilities along the Texas border and report to Judge Gee on children who were being held in filthy conditions without access to basic hygiene items, including soap and toothbrushes.

In another judicial order, a judge in federal court for the District of Columbia late Friday blocked a plan to expand fast-track deportations, known as expedited removals.

The new regulations on holding children and their parents indefinitely were unveiled on Aug. 21 and were an attempt to end the court’s two decades of oversight. The government said the new rules would uphold the goals set out under the Flores agreement for protecting children but would allow the government to detain children and their parents until their asylum cases could be decided.

Because there are more than one million cases pending in immigration court, it often takes years for cases to be completed. By then, administration officials argue, many migrants have skipped court dates and gone into the shadows, living illegally in the United States.

“The Flores settlement agreement remains in effect and has not been terminated,” Judge Gee, an appointee of President Barack Obama, wrote in a two-page order.

She said the new regulations “fail to implement and are inconsistent with” the terms of the agreement, which the government must now continue to comply with.

The ruling is likely to be appealed, and the Supreme Court could ultimately be asked to weigh in.

In a statement late Friday, the White House said that the ruling “perpetuates the loophole that this same judge created, which has been exploited by criminal cartels to smuggle children across the United States Southern Border — often resulting in their physical and sexual abuse.”

“For two and a half years, this administration has worked to restore faithful enforcement of the laws enacted by Congress, while activist judges have imposed their own vision in the place of those duly enacted laws,” the statement said. “The Flores 20-day Loophole violates Congressional removal and detention mandates, creating a new system out of judicial whole cloth. This destructive end-run around the detention and removal system Congress created must end.”

Administration officials had said that the new regulations would fulfill the Flores agreement’s provisions for ensuring that children in the government’s custody are “treated with dignity, respect and special concern for their particular vulnerability.”

But lawyers for the groups who sued on behalf of migrant children said that they did not fulfill the requirements. If adopted as written, they warned in court filings, the new rules would “strike a mortal blow to crucial rights and protections that the settlement confers on vulnerable children.”

After the ruling, Carlos Holguin, who has litigated the case since 1985, said, “We are gratified that the court has ruled in the way it has to protect children from the worst excesses of immigration-related detention.”

“The Flores settlement is the last bulwark against the Trump administration running roughshod over these children,” Mr. Holguin added. “They wanted to detain children as a means of border control.”

The administration claims that the Flores agreement has created incentives to illegal immigration by essentially giving a free pass into the United States to migrants who arrived at the border with a child. This Flores “loophole,” officials argued, led to a rise in the number of families crossing the southern border in recent years.

More than 450,000 people traveling as members of a family have crossed the border in the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, or about three times as many as those last year.

In addition to removing the time limit on detaining children, the proposed new regulations would also allow the government to avoid having to obtain state licensing for secure detention facilities holding migrant children. States often have stringent requirements for such things as schooling, health care and recreation programs.

Government lawyers said that the new regulations would still allow for state oversight.

At a brief hearing on Friday before she issued her order, Judge Gee clearly signaled her intention to find that the government’s new regulations ran afoul of the consent decree, which it must comply with unless it is replaced with legislation passed by Congress.

“How can you as officer of the court tell me that the regulations are not inconsistent with the settlement agreement?” the judge asked a Justice Department lawyer. “Just because you tell me it is night outside does not mean it is not day.”

“The Congress of the United States could enact laws to repeal the consent decree,” she added, but until then, the government “must abide by the consent decree.”

The judge also said that she was bound by basic contract law to uphold the Flores agreement.

“It’s my obligation to enforce an agreement the parties agreed to,” she said.

The government lawyer, August E. Flentje, said that circumstances had changed since 1997, and that called for the court to exercise “flexibility” in assessing the new rules.

The latest legal battle began in June 2018, when Mr. Trump signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to “promptly” request that the federal court alter the Flores agreement. That order followed the president’s short-lived policy of removing children from their parents at the southern border, a policy the administration said was necessary because Flores prevented the government from detaining families together for long periods.

Judge Gee refused to amend the agreement. She blamed more than 20 years of congressional inaction and “ill-considered executive action” for the “current stalemate.” Three months later, the administration published the proposed new Flores regulations for public comment. In August, it published a final version in the Federal Register and said they would take effect in 60 days, barring a court ruling against them of the kind that Judge Gee just issued.

The Obama administration, which faced a spike in migrant families arriving at the border in 2014, tried and failed to get out from under the agreement. The administration erected family detention centers with the aim of holding families until their court cases were completed, a period that almost always stretches well beyond the 20-day limit.

But in 2015, Judge Gee expanded the scope of the settlement to clarify that it applied not just to children traveling alone, but also to those who crossed the border with their parents, ending prospects for long-term family detention.

In addition to trying to update detention standards for migrant children, the Trump administration recently has taken several steps to make it more difficult for migrants to enter the United States.

It has signed agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to encourage those countries to absorb more migrants who are seeking asylum and has introduced a policy that bars migrants from seeking asylum in the United States unless they have sought and failed to obtain it from a country they have passed en route. The administration has also forced more than 45,000 people to wait in border towns in Mexico for their court dates in the United States.

The government currently operates three family detention centers with a 3,000-person capacity.

Kevin McAleenan, the acting Homeland Security secretary, said on Sept. 25 that the administration would roll out new measures to end what he called “catch and release.” Migrant families who do not express a fear of persecution in their home countries could be swiftly deported, and more people who requested asylum would be sent back to Mexico to await their hearings, officials said.