In a new court filing, Trump’s Department of Justice says it’s now legally allowed to detain migrant families — no matter how long their cases take.
The Trump administration is keeping families together. In immigration detention. Indefinitely.
And they’re arguing that a court order preventing family separation gives them the legal power to do so.
In federal court Friday night, Trump’s Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, filed an announcement that it is now keeping families in detention “during the pendency of” their immigration cases. That could easily mean months of detention (or longer) for some asylum-seekers — or, alternatively, a form of “assembly-line justice” that moves families’ cases through too quickly to allow for real due process.
The administration was already trying to get the courts and Congress to approve indefinite family detention, by overruling a 2015 order (made as part of the “Flores settlement”) that prevented children from being kept in immigration detention with their parents for more than 20 days.
But the administration now claims that a more recent court ruling — the order by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw on Tuesday that barred the administration from splitting up any more families and ordered them to reunite the 2,000 remaining separated ones within 30 days — means that they are now allowed to detain thousands of families in temporary facilities for as long as it takes to either grant them legal status or (the administration’s preference) deport them.
