The Trump administration filed papers Thursday saying it wants to modify a landmark court agreement that limited the detention of immigrant children.
The move comes two months after a federal judge in Los Angeles rejected the White House's attempt to indefinitely detain immigrant children caught crossing the border illegally with their parents.
"Today, legal loopholes significantly hinder the department's ability to appropriately detain and promptly remove family units that have no legal basis to remain in the country. This rule addresses one of the primary pull factors for illegal immigration and allows the federal government to enforce immigration laws as passed by Congress," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee issued an order in July lambasting the Justice Department for its request to modify a 1997 legal settlement that set rules for how the government can deal with immigrant children in its custody.
In the filing, the government said it wanted to modify the settlement but said any changes "would satisfy the basic purpose" of the agreement while "ensuring that all juveniles in the government's custody are treated with dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability as minors, while doing so in a manner that is workable in light of subsequent changes."
The government said the new rules "would create an alternative to the existing licensed program requirement for family residential centers, so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement may use appropriate facilities to detain family units together during their immigration proceedings, consistent with applicable law."
The new effort is expected to spark another legal battle between the administration and immigration advocates.
Under the original settlement, the result of a case brought by a Salvadoran teenager in 1985, the government agreed that immigrant minors detained at the border would be released to relatives or other custodians "without unnecessary delay" or placed in licensed facilities within five days, and during a surge, up to 20 days.
The Justice Department had asked that Gee modify the so-called Flores agreement, contending that the terms made it impossible for officials to carry out Trump's June 20 executive order to detain children with parents who faced prosecution for crossing the border illegally. The attorneys subsequently argued that in order to comply with a San Diego judge's order that separated families be reunited, the government no longer could release the minors as required under the settlement.
Gee called the government's interpretation of the settlement "tortured" and accused the administration of a "cynical attempt ... to shift responsibility to the judiciary for over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to the current stalemate."
