Trump admin asks judge for permission to detain children with parents past 20 days
By Laura Jarrett and Clare Foran, CNN Updated 2300 GMT (0700 HKT) June 21, 2018
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Trump administration officials over the past week have regularly suggested their hands were tied under the Flores settlement and later court decisions.
"Pursuant to these court decisions, minors detained as part of a family unit cannot be detained in unlicensed facilities for longer than a presumptively reasonable period of 20 days, at which point, minors must be released or transferred to a licensed facility," according to a "Myth vs. Fact" statement provided by Homeland Security.
But that assertion leaves out the fact that "zero tolerance," the decision to prosecute 100% of illegal border crossings, presented the Trump administration with a policy choice: Keep families together, releasing them into the US on electronic monitoring, or split them apart. Trump chose to split the families at the border -- thereby complying with Flores by not detaining the children, but also prosecuting adults.
In 2015, Gee ruled that the Obama administration's extended detention of undocumented mothers and children had violated the Flores agreement -- setting up the court settlement that now imposes the 20-day limit on holding children with their families.
"The whole point of Judge Gee's decision was to avoid the prolonged and unnecessary detention of children,"said Stephen Legomsky, a former Obama administration DHS official. "Now that she's seen the level of suffering that an unfettered President has elected to inflict on children, I would imagine that if anything her resolve will be even stronger."
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