image 2014 ut still elevant i believe
and yes i do peruse the articles to know whats going on
life isent just fun and games
A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on Sept. 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images
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IMMIGRATION CRISIS: THE FLORES AGREEMENT EXPLAINED
By Saher Khan, news assistant
@SaherMKhan
President Donald Trump
issued an executive order last week that temporarily halted family separations by proposing a new system; family detention. But a decades-old settlement must be changed in order for the government to legally detain families for longer than 20 days. The Flores Agreement, often described by the Trump administration as a “loophole” that’s harming the immigration system, is a 1997 consent decree, or settlement agreement that was designed to prevent the indefinite detainment of unaccompanied minors. Here’s a close look at this agreement and the challenges it presents to the president’s immigration efforts:
The history: Flores v. Reno’s story begins in 1985 when class action lawsuits involving the government’s detainment, treatment and release of unaccompanied minors were filed against the now defunct agency, Immigration and Naturalization Service. One such lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador named Jenny Lisette Flores. Children in detainment were strip searched daily and would at times share living quarters and bathrooms with unrelated adult men and women. The ACLU asserted that the detention was in violation of the children’s rights. The case was litigated for 12 years until a settlement agreement was reached in 1997.
What it does: The agreement restricts the federal government from indefinitely detaining unaccompanied minors and requires the government to release a child as soon as possible into the custody of parents, other adult relatives or a licensed child-care program. If no guardian is identified, the child must be be put in the least restrictive setting and the government must follow a certain standard of care. Over the years, laws enacted by Congress require the Department of Homeland Security to hand children over to the Department of Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for placing children with the proper guardian. The initial settlement largely focused on unaccompanied minors. But a case against the Obama administration changed that.
An previous court case: In 2014, the U.S. saw a surge in Central American families crossing the border into the U.S. to seek asylum. The Obama administration, in an effort to deter this migration, began detaining families. This was challenged by immigration advocates in the courts under the Flores Agreement. Federal District Judge Dolly M. Gee sided with the advocates, ruling that the administration could not detain children, even those accompanied by their parents, and ordered the administration to release children from detention after 20 days.
The impending legal battle: President Trump’s solution to family separation is detaining children as a family unit, the same strategy used by the Obama administration. This is in clear violation of the Flores agreement, which means after 20 days, the order becomes illegal. The Trump administration has asked the courts, specifically Judge Gee, to alter the Flores agreement in order to legally detain families.