'That's Not An Option' - Trump's Immigration Policies Are Getting Trashed By Federal Courts

[DonViejo]

By Alice Ollstein | July 18, 2018 6:00 am

The Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies — including the forced separation of parents and children and the denial of parole to asylum-seekers without criminal records — are running into a buzzsaw in federal courtrooms across the country. Again and again, conservative and progressive judges alike are not only ruling against the government, they are breaking from their usual measured legalese to excoriate the administration for misrepresenting the current state of immigration, making promises in bad faith, and flouting both federal law and the Constitution.

These repeated legal setbacks, however, have not entirely stripped the administration of the ability to enact harsh immigration policies, including ones that will lead to future family separations and the denial of asylum to formerly eligible immigrants fleeing deadly conditions in their home countries.

A judicial pounding

Over the past few weeks, courts have ordered the Trump administration to reunite most of the families it separated, to halt deportations of those families, and to give asylum-seekers due process in their parole hearings. Judges have also rejected the administration’s attempt to roll back decades-old legal protections for migrant children.

In a scathing ruling in early July, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee blasted the Justice Department for arguing that it needed to scrap or weaken the 1997 Flores settlement that sets minimum standards for the treatment of children in immigration detention — particularly the provision that sets a limit of 20 days for holding a child in a facility not designed for children.

“It is apparent that Defendants’ Application is a cynical attempt … to shift responsibility to the Judiciary for over 20 years of Congressional inaction and ill-considered Executive action that have led to the current stalemate,” wrote Gee, who serves in the Central District of California in Los Angeles. She went on to rake the administration over the coals for asserting without evidence that her 2015 ruling upholding Flores caused a surge in illegal immigration, and for stating untruthfully that immigrant families on supervised release “frequently fail to appear” at their court hearings, when 15 years of government data show that 86 percent of family detainees attend all of their court dates.

more
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/trumps-immigration-policies-are-getting-trashed-by-federal-courts