MSNBC
By Amanda Sakuma
August 7, 2015
The
U.S. government is asking a federal court to reconsider allowing it to
continue detaining immigrant women and children caught along the
southwestern border after the
government was ordered to immediately release the families seeking
refuge in the U.S.
A
district court judge in California issued a scathing order last month
condemning the Obama administration for violating a decades-old
agreement that outlined standards
for keeping children in federal custody. Judge Dolly Gee found it both
“astonishing” and “shocking” that officials would spend millions of
dollars to build new facilities from the ground up without first
ensuring the detention centers comply with those standards.
Lawyers
from the Department of Justice formally responded late Thursday,
arguing that the policies under contention were already outdated by the
time the court reached
its decision. If the judge’s order was upheld, and the families were
released, there would be grave repercussions, they argued.
“The
proposed remedies could heighten the risk of another surge in illegal
migration across our Southwest border by Central American families,
including by incentivizing
adults to bring children with them on their dangerous journey as a
means to avoid detention and gain access to the interior of the United
States,” the Justice Department attorneys wrote.
The
federal government had rushed to build two new immigrant detention
centers in south Texas that were designed to accommodate children,
equipped with playgrounds and
classrooms, in the wake of a humanitarian crisis at the border. More
than 60,000 unaccompanied minor children were captured after fleeing
from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in the last fiscal year,
over-taxing virtually every level of the government’s
response and fueling a heated political debate over immigration reform.
Administration
officials said at the time that once the children completed the legal
process, the vast majority of them would ultimately be sent back home.
But just the
opposite was happening. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services found
that nearly 90% of women and children held in immigrant detention
centers expressed a credible fear of returning to their home countries –
and so they could continue the process of seeking
asylum.
Advocacy
groups condemned the government’s response on Friday, arguing that
family detention is a flawed policy that was hastily implemented. The
number of families caught
entering the U.S. has dropped in the last year, down more than 50%.
With the flow of migration down, the groups say they want to see the
practice of family detention abandoned entirely.
“In
speaking of ‘dis-incentivizing’ future migration of families, the
government ignores the fact that it is perfectly legal to seek asylum,”
said Olga Byrne of Human
Rights First. “Rather than spending millions of taxpayer dollars to
violate the rights of innocent children and families, the U.S. should be
expanding the use of humane, community-based alternatives to detention
programs, which are proven effective in securing
appearances in court while also providing support to refugees.”
The
detention policy was already under fire from yet another federal court
that ordered earlier this year that the U.S. may not detain families
with solid claims for asylum.
U.S. officials had recently begun implementing new policies designed to
dramatically shorten the time immigrant families were detained while
their asylum cases are considered.
There
are 178 House Democrats who have signed a letter calling on the
administration to comply with Judge Gee’s order and release the roughly
1,700 women and children
currently being detained.
“It’s
disappointing that the Administration continues to push to jail women
and children seeking asylum,” Democratic Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Luis
Gutiérrez and Lucille Roybal-Allard
said in a statement Friday.
“The writing is on the wall – family detention is unacceptable, un-American, and will end.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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