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The lawyers on Friday reacted against the US government's long-standing claim that a landmark agreement reached in 1997 with a court on the care of migrant children in detention had taken children and their families out of America. Central.
Their statement and statements by immigration experts are the last salvo on the Flores accord, which set standards on how unaccompanied migrant children and families with children apprehended together should be protected by the government.
In a previous file dated August 31, the government had said that immigration had changed in the 22 years since the signing of the Flores Agreement. The government also claimed that the agreement itself had resulted in an increase in the number of children and families coming to the United States.
He further argued that these amendments, coupled with a final settlement released in August that would allow unlimited detention of children, should make the Flores agreement theoretically.
The lawyers wrote in the opposition's brief on Friday that the government was trying through its August 31 filing to "make a connection" with Flores' agreement, while asserting that the filing would 39, supported a "vertiginous range" of complaints about children and migrant families that federal courts had already rejected.
Neha Desai, one of the attorneys who contributed to this memoir, said in an email to CBS News that "the government has a legal obligation to guarantee the human rights of children in federal custody." ".
"(The government) has tried several times to ensure that the courts allow it to evade this obligation in recent years.Now the government has tried again, this time by issuing a regulation and using recycled and unsupported arguments, including changed, so that Flores should stop, "wrote Desai, director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Legislation.
"These attempts are a fundamental affront to the long-standing principles of child welfare, not to mention human decency," she added.
In the brief, filed in California Central District District Court, lawyers cited experts who said in joint statements that complex local socio-economic factors drive families with children – or children traveling with family – to uproot their lives. These factors include gang violence, extreme poverty and local government corruption.
"Families do not flee their country of origin, subjecting themselves and their children to the disruption of travel and the risks of travel, for a single motivator – minus a law or obscure policy in a country of Like the Flores settlement in the United States, this may or may not offer some protection against prolonged detention, "wrote Amy Thompson, postdoctoral researcher at the Colegio de Sonora in Mexico, where she studies migration.
His observation was echoed in an accompanying statement by Fernando Chang-Muy, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who traveled to Honduras in May 2019 to present potential asylum seekers with information about the legal obstacles they might face in the United States.
"Few of them are aware of the existence of the Flores Settlement Agreement," Chang-Muy wrote.
President Donald Trump and other government officials have long claimed that the Flores Accord is seen as a loophole for adult migrants to take their children to the United States, as families can not be detained too much long time. The agreement provides for unaccompanied children to be quickly placed with "godparents" – usually parents. An opinion issued in 2015 by the judge supervising the agreement gave rise to a so-called "Rule of 20 days" limit the detention of families.
The final settlement announced by the government on August 21 would eliminate these limitations. It should come into effect on October 22. Government officials have expressed the belief that this measure would deter future migrants.
"With the Flores solution … we are looking forward to seeing fewer family cells crossing the border," said Ken Cuccinelli, Acting Director of US Immigration Services. a video posted on Twitter the day the settlement was announced.
However, the government's own data contradicts its assessment of the "20-day rule," according to an analysis presented Friday by political science professor Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego.
"The government's assertions on the correlation obscure the fact that the decision made in 2015 in Flores fits into a growing trend of apprehension of migrant families," wrote Wong.
In the past year, immigration forces have faced a resurgence of unaccompanied migrant families and children fleeing misery and violence in Central America. In the file filed by the government on Aug. 31 in the Flores case, Deputy Attorney General Joseph Hunt said changes in migration patterns mean that it's no longer possible, equitable nor in the public interest "to maintain Flores' agreement.
This argument was refuted Friday by Susan Martin, professor emeritus at Georgetown University, whose decades of immigration policy include the publication of one of the first studies on unaccompanied refugee children, the leadership of two congressional committees and the drafting of the first guidelines of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on protection. refugee women.
"I think American policymakers were aware of the irregular migration of accompanied children – not just unaccompanied children – when Flores' initial settlement agreement was negotiated in 1997," wrote Martin. She noted that at the time, "families were the preference" and that new waves of migrants were expected:
"The first Flores colony was not adopted in a vacuum – the federal government knew full well that children were coming to the United States, alone or with their families."
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