Federal judge gives Trump 14 days to reunite immigrant families
San Diego District Judge Dana Sabraw has given Donald Trump's administration a final window to reunite all immigrant children under the age of 5 with their…
Seems like not all judges will sit idly by President Trump's anti-immigration measures.
After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trump’s immigration ban, a district judge in San Diego issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday night requiring that "nearly all children younger than 5 be returned to their parents within 14 days and that older children be returned within 30 days," reported Politico.
In what he called "a chaotic circumstance of the Government’s own making," Sabraw said, "It was a startling reality that no adequate planning had been done before officials embarked on a policy to separate children from parents kept in immigration custody or referred for criminal prosecution," the report continues.
Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April the establishment of the "zero tolerance" policy against undocumented immigration at the border, more than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents after being apprehended by Border Patrol.
In his sentence, Sabraw demands the reunification of the children with their families, as well as allowing the parents to speak with their children within a period of 10 days, and prohibits the government from deporting any father without his child.
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While the government has issued an executive order suspending the family separation proceedings, the administration has decided to imprison the families together while the criminal proceedings are underway, thus dismissing a 1997 judicial precedent known as the Flores Agreement.
In this way, Trump and his government intend to keep the new policies on track while looking for ways to reunite the separated families without shedding light on the precision of the mechanisms for doing so.
Despite Judge Sabraw's decision, the administration "is still free to prosecute illegal border crossers, but the ruling seeks to preserve the constitutional rights of families in custody," the Hill reported.
This sentence is the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during March in favor of an immigrant mother and her six-year-old daughter who were separated in November after entering the country, fleeing the religious persecution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to The Guardian.
But this precedent can now be used for the thousands of families currently separated when crossing the border with Mexico.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on an immigration proposal designed jointly between moderate and conservative Republicans that contains a budget of $25 billion for a border wall and other mechanisms to limit immigration in exchange for a path for citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, undocumented youth who arrived in the country as children.
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