Republicans Seek to End Flores Agreement Which Protects Migrant Children From Being Jailed

The Flores agreement mandates that migrant children cannot be held in detention for more than 20 days. In late August, the Trump administration announced its plans to roll back Flores—putting thousands of children in danger.  We must fight this.

The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday [8/20/19] unveiled a sweeping new set of regulations for detaining migrant children, replacing more than two decades of protections that were put into place as a result of what happened to Alma and her fellow detainees in 1985. The new standards, set to be published later this week, would allow the government to detain children and families indefinitely, revise the minimum standards of care and, if they stand up in court, end the 22-year-old consent decree, known as the Flores agreement, that has protected the nation’s youngest and most vulnerable new arrivals.

Alma, noted above, is the origin of the Flores agreement.  Read this.  DO NOT LOOK AWAY.

Nearly 35 years ago... a different and more brutal migrant crisis was unfolding.  In El Salvador, government death squads were stalking suspected insurgents...widening civil war would leave more than 75,000 people dead, and send tens of thousands of people fleeing to the United States.

One of them was Alma Yanira Cruz, a 12-year-old girl who made her way north to join her mother in Los Angeles after her grandfather and uncle were killed.

What happened to her after she arrived in 1985 violated nearly every principle of today’s standards for protecting migrant children.

A barricade of razor wire surrounded an old motel in Pasadena, Calif., north of Los Angeles, where migrants were locked in overcrowded rooms, children and adults jammed in together. For weeks, the girl remained there — offered no schooling, no recreation, no doctors, no visits with relatives.  “She told me they didn’t give her enough food. She told me she fell out of a high bunk bed.”

The Flores agreement has protected migrant children from indefinite detention for decades. We reject the Republicans' dangerous attempt to jail children indefinitely and weaken protections.

When the Trump administration last year tried to get around the Flores agreement by separating children from their parents in order to detain the parents alone, the policy created such an uproar that it was soon rescinded, at least officially. Then, administration lawyers went to court to try to win permission to keep children with their parents in detention-type facilities for longer than 20 days.

Judge Dolly Gee of Federal District Court in Los Angeles, who oversees the agreement, denied the government’s request.

“These regulations issued under orders from the White House show President Trump’s decision to politicize the detention of migrant children as part of his re-election campaign and his callous indifference to their safety and well-being,” said Peter Schey, who along with his co-counsel, Carlos Holguin, filed the original lawsuit.  “If someone had told me in 1985 that our work to protect children would continue into 2019,” Mr. Holguin said, “there is no way I would have believed it.”

The Flores agreement sought to stop things like this:

“Children were being indefinitely detained. The government was using them as bait to arrest their parents,” said Mr. Holguin.

The most serious thing they found was that immigration agents were doing body cavity searches on migrant children, said John Hagar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, a co-counsel in the case. “They would look up a boy’s anus and a girl’s vagina,” he said.

The lawsuit filed on July 11, 1985, argued that the government needed to meet basic child-welfare standards, with education, recreation and medical examinations. It also said the authorities should release children to competent and available adults, rather than indefinitely detaining them until a parent or legal guardian could come forward.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/flores-migrant-children-detention.html