U.S. District Court Chief Judge Dolly M. Gee excoriated the Trump administration over its treatment of migrant children in a pair of decisions this week, saying she saw no choice but to name a new enforcer to protect kids it has detained.
“Defendants cannot claim amnesia as to the history of the case,” Gee wrote Monday in a order to force compliance with the Flores Settlement. The nearly 30-year-old legal agreement ensures minimum standards for housing, education and medical care for migrant kids in federal custody, as well limits on how long they can be held in government facilities.
The next morning, the judge named attorney Andrea Sheridan Ordin as special master and Dr. Paul H. Wise as independent monitor to enforce the agreement, over the objections of federal officials.
Gee has managed the settlement for nearly as long as she’s sat on the federal bench in Los Angeles, while President Trump has spent the bulk of his time in Washington seeking to dissolve it.
Their stalemate heated up this summer, when a fresh appeal seeking to undo the agreement reached the 9th Circuit. The appellate panel voiced serious doubts about undoing the consent decree at oral arguments in June. But experts said the administration likely would appeal an unfavorable ruling to the Supreme Court, leaving the fate of hundreds of children and their families in doubt.
The new oversight further complicates the matter.
Gee made a similar move to enforce the settlement in response to the president’s controversial first-term family separation policy and widespread public outcry over the treatment of children in immigration detention. The most recent special master’s term ended last summer, just as the Trump administration began to ramp up its mass deportation program, rounding up and detaining thousands of immigrants.
Over the last year, advocates have collected declarations from scores of detainees describing inedible food, substandard medical care and callous treatment at the hands of guards and staff. Multiple parents recounted a Christmas photo-op in which an ICE agent dressed as Santa Claus shoved away children who tried to hug him, then vanished with his treats the moment the cameras disappeared.
Others told of children suffering serious ailments who were shooed off with Tylenol.
“At a minimum, the evidence regarding medical care is conflicting and the reported differences in reality are stark,” Gee wrote in her order.
She also waved off the government’s demand that others should pay for the new overseers, calling it “absurd.”
At the Aug. 4 hearing, Gee voiced frustration with the way the government calculated time in custody — a central holding of the settlement.
The current agreement puts a 72-hour limit on children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody and a strict 20-day cap on those in family facilities operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But ICE had reported only the average length of stay for children already released, and not those who still were detained. It also shaved off time those same children were held by CBP or in airports or hotels.
Administration representatives said the average time in custody was artificially inflated by families it’d kept in measles quarantine this winter, as well as those it could not immediately deport to Venezuela following the devastating earthquakes there this summer.
“Fifty percent of our population is Venezuelan, and our ability to repatriate them has been extremely limited,” said Dawnisha Helland, ICE’s acting assistant director of enforcement and removal.
Gee rejected those arguments.
“I want to remind you that what is in the settlement is five days,” the judge said. “It was the government’s request to have 20.”
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