The 20 year consent agreement to release migrant children from detention center’s in a timely manner cannot be torn up by the Trump admin the judge has ruled….
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.