20 days are enough for anyone surely
There’s another kicker to Trump’s supposed rescinding of the policy to steal immigrants’ children: it’s good for only 20 days.
Though President Trump declared that the executive order he signed Wednesday would “solve” the problem of family separation while parents are prosecuted for illegal border crossing, the order is really only good for 20 days, CBS News’ Paula Reid reports, citing a source familiar with the drafting of the order. The order does not override the 1993 Flores v. Reno Supreme Court case, which says that detained migrant children cannot be held in government detention facilities for more than 20 days.
Essentially, this means that after the 20-day mark, children may still be separated from their parents.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) currently separates most families when they are apprehended for illegal border crossing, Reid notes. But now, with the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will take custody of the entire family. However, at the 20-day mark, under the Flores consent decree, the department will have to release the children from custody.
Mind you, other reporting I’ve seen says there are vague plans to try to tweak Flores in some way, but it also says it’s not clear that can be done, that it’s a can of worms, etc.
Oh (reading on) – this reporting too.
Nothing in the executive order stops the government from releasing the whole family, Reid says, but under Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy, which states that the U.S. will prosecute all who cross the border illegally, releasing the family is unlikely.
Reid also reports that Sessions is expected to immediately ask a federal California judge to modify the Flores consent decree to permit the government to detain families together throughout the entire prosecution and deportation processes.
It is unclear how long this will take to litigate or whether the judges would be willing to permit indefinite detention of minors.
Of course the “zero-tolerance policy” is optional; they have chosen to treat unauthorized immigration as a crime.
This, from the executive order, doesn’t sound that vague to me:
The Flores settlement certainly wasn’t intended to be used to separate families so some modification may be allowed. We shall see.
The fact that the wording doesn’t sound vague doesn’t mean the request or plan or policy is not vague. It’s possible to use clear wording to request the impossible.
And don’t tell us “we shall see.” That’s what Trump keeps saying, and it’s idiotic. Yes, we’ll know more about the future when it happens; we know that.
Trump’s supporters on Facebook, I’ve found, have a habit of conflating “law” and “policy” and pretending both are one in the same. The state of the law is largely unchanged throughout the last few administrations; it’s been the policies for addressing the law that have been tweaked or, in the most recent abomination, mangled. So they’ll say, “This was policy under Obama,” which of course it wasn’t, because Obama used the much-reviled ‘catch and release’ set of policies, instead. The car is still the same car–it’s just that there’s now a drunken, untrained asshole at the wheel, now.