Oakland Attorneys Say Immigrant Children Are Being Held in Prison-Like Conditions

Oakland-based attorneys pushing back against the Trump administration in federal court raised alarms as they said they have evidence of children being held for weeks in prison-like conditions in U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody.

Now, a federal judge is reaffirming those allegations and upholding the federal government’s responsibility to process detained immigrant children as expeditiously as possible. The ruling comes after the Trump administration again sought to end a settlement requiring humane treatment of children in federal custody.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee on Friday rejected the administration’s bid to throw out the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which requires the government to transfer detained children to a guardian or a licensed facility within three days. Gee’s ruling, which she also enforced in a Monday motion, requires that the government also improve the current conditions of facilities.

“The judge recognized that the conditions that are currently in CBP custody are unacceptable for kids to be held in for any length of time,” said Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, one of the plaintiffs working to uphold the settlement terms. “She continues to recognize that children deserve at least the bare minimum in terms of humanitarian conditions and dignity if the government chooses to hold them in detention.”

The Trump administration in May moved to terminate the Flores settlement, saying it was not necessary because the government had already put in place such policies. The agreement had actually “ossified immigration policy,” the administration argued in its motion, by increasing the number of children entering the country.

The agreement has “changed the immigration landscape by removing some of the disincentives for families to enter the U.S. unlawfully,” the administration said in the motion. “Unlawful family migration barely existed in 1997.”

Plaintiffs fired back against the administration, moving for the court to enforce the longstanding agreement and arguing that the government violated the agreement because it had kept children at border stations for weeks to months in poor conditions.

Gee, however, said it appeared that the government was trying to reduce the amount of time children may be held at a Border Patrol station. In the most recent report by the CBP’s juvenile coordinator that tracks time in custody, the average time detained at family facilities had decreased in the last few months.

“This indicates that CBP is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it,” Gee said.

Still, the judge said current times in custody are too long, Wolozin said.

“She was very clear that weeks, months in these facilities is a blatant violation of the settlement agreement and the children’s basic rights,” Wolozin said.

Children in CBP detention sometimes don’t see the sun “for days at a time” and talk about being very cold and separated from their families, Wolozin said.

Additional families say that detention facilities sometimes lack the ability to flush toilets, provide infrequent showers for children and have inadequate access to medical care, according to claims by individuals in detention facilities.

“This underscores precisely why the prolonged times in CBP custody remain a significant problem,” Gee said in her ruling enforcing the agreement. “CBP facilities, by design, are not suitable for minors for long periods of time.”

President Donald Trump first tried to do away with the settlement during his first term before Gee blocked the changes. The Department of Homeland Security asked in 2018 to exempt it from provisions regarding release and exempt U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s family facilities from the agreement’s state license requirement.

By the time children reach these facilities, Wolozin said,  they are at the end of an already “difficult, traumatic journey” where they’re often fleeing violence.

“When they’re placed in these restrictive settings that don’t treat them like children but instead treat them like criminals, it compounds all of the harms they’re trying to escape,” Wolozin said. “It also causes them to stay in this really heightened sense of anxiety and awareness of their surroundings — sort of a hypervigilance — that is really bad for children and their bodies.”

KQED’s Tyche Hendricks contributed to this report.