The Southern Poverty Law Center said Tuesday it filed a class-action lawsuit against the the Trump administration last week on behalf of more than 10,000 migrant children who have been detained for crossing the border.
The lawsuit argued that the children’s due process rights as asylum seekers were violated and called for their immediate release.
“If the President is really interested in taking on a crisis in regard to the immigration situation — this is one he has the power to solve, since his Administration created it,” said Mary Bauer, deputy legal director for the center’s Immigrant Justice Project. “We have over 10,000 children in custody right now because this administration is using them as bait. This deplorable, deliberate policy means that these children are languishing in detention for months at a time.”
The Center originally filed the legal action last year in federal court in Alexandria, Va., on behalf of children who were being held in that state. The new lawsuit covers thousands more that are being held in 100 federal detention centers.
Now, the group says, the number of children being held has reached a “crisis level.”
Last April, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services agreed that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement would share information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about adults who agreed to sponsor a child in federal custody.
The lawsuit charged the administration did this in order to scare families in Central America from migrating to the U.S. because they risked having their child taken away and then having the adult who picked him or her up from HHS be taken into custody by ICE and possibly deported.
“A memo drafted in late 2017 and obtained January 17, 2019 reveals the Administration intended the very result this policy has caused: the prolonged detention of children,” the group said in the release.
“Children belong in homes with families, not warehoused in government detention centers,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the Immigrant Advocacy Program and the Legal Aid Justice Center, said in a statement. “But the government is still using sponsors’ information for ICE immigration arrests. They’re still targeting the sponsors themselves, and as a result over 10,000 immigrant children are still stuck in detention for longer than ever before.”
Other groups that are part of the suit include the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc. and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
