Trump Officials Urge End of 20-Day Limit for Detaining Children

WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials told a Senate panel Tuesday that a decades-old court ruling that limits the length of time migrant children can be detained hampers the government’s ability to stem unauthorized immigration, and needs to be amended by Congress.

The officials, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, said the 1997 consent decree known as the Flores agreement had encouraged hundreds of thousands of migrants to cross the southwestern border with their children, knowing that they would not be detained if they were traveling with minors.

Under the court agreement, migrant children cannot be detained for more than 20 days.

“It creates a business model for smugglers,” Robert Perez, the acting deputy commissioner for Customs and Border Protection, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Joseph Edlow, an acting deputy assistant attorney general, said modifying the court agreement would “cut off one of the pull-factors” for migrants coming to the United States from Central American countries.

The hearing comes nearly two weeks after the Trump administration proposed a new regulation to allow the government to sidestep the decree and detain children with their parents while their cases are being considered by immigration courts. In July, the Trump administration lost its bid to persuade a federal court to allow long-term detention of migrant families.

The proposed regulation has drawn fire from immigration advocates and Democrats, who said it defied decades of rules governing the treatment of migrant children.

“Why are you here recommending a set of changes that would allow the detention of children?” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.

She said she would oppose any changes that would allow children to be detained for long periods. “It’s absolutely unacceptable to detain children,” she said. “This is not who we are.”

Other Democrats on the panel expressed similar reservations about allowing the federal government to indefinitely hold children in detention centers.

Several Republicans, however, said they supported amending the court settlement to allow children to be detained with their parents.

“The Flores settlement represents a significant hurdle to the enforcement of immigration law,” said Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont. He said the agreement needed to be fixed to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers do their jobs.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the chairman of the committee, said he hoped to find a bipartisan solution to address the flow of unauthorized immigration without holding children in detention for long.

The federal government has long struggled to deal with the increasing number of families who cross the border, seeking asylum.

In 2014, the Obama administration faced a similar dilemma as thousands of unaccompanied children surged across the border with their families. The Obama administration also tried to amend the Flores agreement but was rebuffed by the courts.

Adults who cross the border alone and are apprehended by the Border Patrol can be held indefinitely in jails. Children who cross alone may be placed for longer than 20 days in nonsecure shelters — meaning that they can technically leave at any time.

Families traveling with children who cross the border, however, represent a unique challenge.

Once they are apprehended by the Border Patrol or turn themselves in to customs officers at ports of entry, families are typically placed in federally run detention centers that are designed to house children and adults together.

But they can be held for only up to 20 days, under the Flores ruling. In past years, families were often released — sometimes with GPS ankle bracelets or some other form of electronic monitoring, while their cases went through courts — in a practice the Trump administration has reviled as a “catch and release” immigration policy.

In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions installed a “zero tolerance” immigration policy, in which the government sought to jail and prosecute every adult who crossed the border illegally.

For months, migrant families were separated as adults were placed in detention and their children were sent to shelters across the country. Widespread outrage led the Trump administration to end the practice.