LOS ANGELES (PM) — A federal judge on Friday denied new regulations that would enable the government to detain children and their parents in confinement for indefinite periods, one of the Trump administration’s trademark efforts to reduce a substantial number of families arriving from Central America.
Describing the government’s defense of its proposed new policy as “Kafkaesque” in some of its reasoning, Judge Dolly Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California stated it was up to Congress, not the administration, to usurp a 20-year-old consent decree that orders children to be held in state-licensed facilities and released in most cases within 20 days.
President Trump has frequently scrutinized the “legal loopholes” that he said requires the government to engage in what he calls “catch and release” of migrant families who have been arriving, until recently, in record numbers on the southern border.
Under the 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores agreement, the government must endeavor to quickly release children from detention and sustain a number of minimum standards for them in secure detention facilities.
