#flores settlement

Alyssa Oursler at The Guardian:

On 28 January, hundreds of protesters gathered near the Dilley immigration processing center in south Texas, where hundreds of children are being held. Days earlier, immigration lawyer Eric Lee filmed a video of detainees screaming and chanting “libertad”, or “freedom”. Soon after, solidarity events arose in the state. “Community members saw the children and families crying out [and] having their own protests from within and said to everybody: we need to show up there too,” said the Rev Erin Walter, executive director of the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry. Locally, more than 30 organizations, including Walter’s church, mobilized over the course of three days to amplify the voices of the people inside, with many organizers calling for an end to family detention altogether. Since Donald Trump took office, the daily number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention has grown sixfold. At least 3,800 people under the age of 18 have been booked into custody during that time.

Demonstrations like the one outside Dilley are part of a resurgent, faith-backed campaign to end family detention in the United States. While the movement has ebbed and flowed across administrations, it has gained new momentum this year following the arrest and detention of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was photographed wearing a Spider-Man backpack and blue bunny hat as he was detained during Minnesota’s ICE surge. Liam and his father, who have pending asylum claims, were sent to Dilley. The child quickly became a symbol for many Americans of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown – and its impact on children. “One of the attempts [of the protests] was to make sufficient noise so that the people inside would know that they were not forgotten by the outside world,” Amerika Garcia Grewal, who helped organize the event, said. “There’s just no acceptable time for a child to be in detention.”

‘State-sponsored child abuse’

In some sense, Dilley is a response to previous organizing efforts against extreme immigration enforcement. During Trump’s first term, his administration’s zero-tolerance approach included separating thousands of children from their families at the southern border. Dilley, opened during the Obama administration then shuttered under Biden, was reopened early last year. Instead of separating families, children would be held with their parents. Still, the facility has been criticized by detainees, lawyers and advocates for inhumane conditions, including a recent measles outbreak, lack of clean drinking water, and inadequate medical care. According to Representative Joaquin Castro, Ramos was not eating well while there. Critics say these conditions violate a 1997 legal settlement that provides protections to children in immigrant detention, including a 20-day limit on time spent in custody.

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Destination abolition

Dilley is not the sole focus of activists – stopping the construction of new detention centers is also at play. Recently released documents outlined ICE’s plan to spend $38bn buying warehouses to turn into detention centers. “I don’t know how much more explicit the administration could be about their intention to cruelly house people in inhumane conditions,” Smith said. The cruelty on display seems to be swaying public opinion; in a recent poll, 65% of respondents across the political spectrum said ICE had gone too far in its immigration crackdown, up from 54% last June.

The New Mexico senate recently passed a bill banning ICE detention centers in the state, while Illinois has strict limits on private detention facilities – two examples of state-level efforts that could offer a path forward on a wider scale. Private owners have also declined such transactions after pushback.

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Intergenerational trauma

Last month’s protest ended with teargas. Walter had to pause our interview to cough, despite not being in the group that received the worst of the chemical agents deployed by Texas state troopers. Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old in the bunny hat, was released from Dilley in early February. Castro escorted them home. In granting their habeas petition, Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas’s western district, questioned the government’s justification for detaining a young child with a pending asylum claim. “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote.

Maanvi Singh at The Guardian:

The Trump administration is trying to end a cornerstone immigration policy that requires the government to provide basic rights and protections to child immigrants in its custody. The protections, which are drawn from a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores Settlement Agreement, limit the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. It also requires the government to provide children in its custody with adequate food, water and clean clothes. The administration’s move to terminate the Flores agreement was long anticipated. In a court motion filed Thursday, the justice department argued that the Flores agreement should be “completely” terminated, claiming it has incentivized unauthorized border crossings and “prevented the federal government from effectively detaining and removing families”. Donald Trump also tried to end these protections during his first term, making very similar arguments. The move to end protections follows a slew of actions by the Trump administration that target children, including restarting the practice of locking up children along with their parents in family detention. Immigration advocacy groups have alleged in a class-action lawsuit filed earlier this month that unaccompanied children are languishing in government facilities after the administration unveiled policies making it exceedingly difficult for family members in the US to take custody of them. The president and lawmakers have also sought to cut off unaccompanied children’s access to legal services and make it harder for families in detention to seek legal aid. “Eviscerating the rudimentary protections that these children have is unconscionable,” said Mishan Wroe, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law. “At this very moment, babies and toddlers are being detained in family detention, and children all over the country are being detained and separated from their families unnecessarily.”

The effort to suspend the Flores agreement “bears the Trump administration’s hallmark disregard for the rule of law – and for the wellbeing of toddlers who have done no wrong”, said Faisal al-Juburi of the Texas-based legal non-profit Raices. “This administration would rather enrich private prison contractors with the $45bn earmarked for immigrant detention facilities in the House’s depraved spending bill than to uphold basic humanitarian protections for babies.” The Trump administration in 2019 asked a judge to dissolve the Flores Settlement Agreement, but its motion was struck down. During the Biden administration, a federal judge agreed to partially lift oversight protections at the Department of Health and Human Services, but the agreement is still in place at the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies.

Olivia Troye at Living It With Olivia:

We're now at the end of the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, and we're witnessing something many feared but hoped wouldn't happen: U.S. citizenship becoming conditional rather than absolute.

The Reality on the Ground

In recent weeks, multiple verified cases have emerged of U.S. citizen children being deported alongside their undocumented parents:

A 2-year-old U.S. citizen was deported to Honduras with their mother, prompting a federal judge to express "strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process."

A 4-year-old U.S. citizen with a rare form of metastatic stage 4 cancer was deported "without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians," despite ICE being notified in advance of the child's urgent medical needs; their 7-year-old sibling was deported as well.

A 10-year-old U.S. citizen recovering from brain cancer was deported to a rural part of Mexico despite having hospital documentation and having been previously allowed to travel to Houston for treatment.

These cases aren’t bureaucratic errors. They are a deliberate shift, where citizenship no longer guarantees protection, and the Trump administration is counting on us to accept it.  Bear with me as I get personal for a moment: I am disgusted by what this administration is doing to these families, and especially to these children. Kids with cancer deserve medical care, not deportation. They deserve treatment, follow-up, and a fighting chance. To deport a child without their medication isn’t just cruel. It’s inhumane. It’s indefensible. It crosses a line no decent government should ever cross. This isn’t immigration policy. It’s cruelty, weaponized against the most vulnerable. And if we don’t call it what it is, if we don’t fight it now, it won’t stop at the border, or at the hospital doors.

The Blueprint for Dismantling Protections

The policies enabling these deportations align precisely with Project 2025, the administration's published blueprint. This plan explicitly calls for:

Ending the Flores Settlement Agreement, which removes court oversight and allows for indefinite detention of migrant children while also affecting U.S. citizen siblings caught in enforcement sweeps.

Transferring custody of children from Health and Human Services (HHS) welfare experts to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforcement agents.

Creating a massive border and immigration superagency by merging Customs & Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Department of Health and Human Services ​​Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), and the immigration courts (EOIR) into a single Cabinet-level department, consolidating unprecedented power over who belongs in America.

Weakening asylum protections for unaccompanied minors and expanding detention powers.

The real-world implementation of these policies is already visible in the administration's actions:

Mixed-status families are being targeted, with U.S. citizen children treated as collateral damage in deportation operations.

Legal protections for children are being dismantled one by one.

When judges have attempted to intervene, they've faced threats and more recently have been arrested. The White House recently refused to rule out arresting federal judges, even Supreme Court justices, who oppose its immigration crackdowns.

The Erosion of Citizenship

The administration's defenders claim that "having a U.S. citizen child doesn't make you immune from the laws of the country." But what law did these children break? In America, citizenship is supposed to mean something. Due process is supposed to mean something. Deporting citizens, especially children, without due process isn't law enforcement. It's lawbreaking by the state itself. The dangerous precedent is clear: if citizenship can be stripped away by executive whim for some, it can eventually be stripped from anyone. A society where your rights depend on the government's mood is not a democracy. It's authoritarianism. It’s precisely why we need to pay close attention to the direct challenge to constitutional protections that’s about to come to a head. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on May 15 regarding President Trump's executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, with a decision expected by late June or early July that could fundamentally reshape who qualifies as an American citizen by birth. 

The Historical Warning Signs

History teaches us to recognize these patterns. When governments begin targeting the most vulnerable populations, the circle of those considered "other" inevitably expands. Consider: In Nazi Germany, the White Rose movement, university students, and their professors, distributed leaflets exposing Hitler's crimes at enormous personal risk. Sophie Scholl, executed at just 21, asked: "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?" During Argentina's "Dirty War," the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marched weekly in Buenos Aires wearing white headscarves embroidered with the names of their disappeared children. Their silent visibility shattered the regime's wall of silence. These examples remind us that resistance often begins with refusing to look away from injustice.

What Comes Next

The deportation of U.S. citizen children isn't the endpoint. It's the test run. Project 2025 is a 180-day plan to fundamentally restructure the system before effective opposition can mobilize. We're now 100 days in. If the government can deport some citizens today, what prevents it from targeting political opponents tomorrow? What stops them from stripping dissenters of citizenship altogether? This isn't improvisation or overreach by individual agents. It's a documented plan being methodically implemented. The Heritage Foundation's agenda explicitly calls for:

Mass deportations inside the U.S.

Criminalization of humanitarian aid groups.

Expansion of detention powers.

The gutting of long-standing asylum protections.

Imposition of political loyalty tests for immigrants.

The Choice Before Us

The next phase will move even faster as the administration accelerates the implementation of its immigration and citizenship policies. The erosion of protections, expansion of detention authority, and acceleration of deportations are set to escalate.

Adolfo Flores at BuzzFeed News: 

The Trump administration on Wednesday announced plans to roll out a new rule that would allow it to detain undocumented children and their parents indefinitely — a move that will most likely be challenged in court.

The yet-to-be-published regulation seeks to replace a 1997 court settlement known as the Flores agreement that limits government detention of children to 20 days. The agreement initially applied only to unaccompanied minors, but in 2015 a federal judge ruled it also extended to children who arrived to the US with their parents, thus applying the 20-day limit to families with children.

The new rule is expected to be published this week in the Federal Register and would take effect 60 days later, though immigration officials expect it will be challenged in court.

If the announced final rule is implemented, it will likely result in thousands of families being detained while their immigration cases play out. The ever-increasing immigration court backlog means these immigrant families could be held for months or even years.

The Trump administration has blamed the Flores settlement for the high numbers of immigrant families arriving at the US–Mexico border, saying it's a pull factor for the thousands of mostly Central Americans who believe they will be released from US custody if they travel with a child. Being able to detain children with their parents while their immigration cases are adjudicated would eliminate the incentive, the administration has said.

"This single ruling has substantially caused and continued to fuel the current family unit crisis and the unprecedented flow of Central American families and minors illegally crossing our border," said Kevin K. McAleenan, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. "The new rule closes the legal loophole that arose from the reinterpretation of Flores.

"All children in the government's care will be treated with dignity, respect, and special concern in conjunction with American values and faithful to the intent of the original settlement," McAleenan said at a press conference Wednesday morning.

Once the final version of the rule has been published, attorneys for plaintiffs in the Flores case, which led to the agreement dictating the conditions immigrant children can be held under, will have 45 days to file a legal challenge if they believe the regulation isn't consistent with the terms of the settlement agreement. The regulation would need to be approved by US District Judge Dolly Gee, who oversaw the settlement agreement.

The Flores settlement agreement says the government has 20 days to transfer immigrant children, including those with parents, to state-licensed facilities. But because states don't detain families, they don't have licensing procedures for facilities that would hold children and parents. As a result, the government can only hold families for 20 days before releasing them.

Justin Wise at The Hill: 

The Trump administration is reportedly expected to introduce new rules aimed at allowing the government to keep migrant families with children in custody for longer than 20 days, the current limit for children detained after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

ABC News, citing two government officials familiar with the plan, reported on the development Tuesday night, noting that the administration could unveil the proposal as soon as Wednesday.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Hill and ABC News.

Under a court agreement known as the Flores Agreement, the government is not permitted to keep children in detention for longer than 20 days. Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly voiced outrage over the policy, arguing that it incentivizes migrants to arrive at the southern border with children.

The Trump administration had pushed last year to alter the settlement in order to detain migrant children with their parents for longer periods of time as officials sought to limit the number of family separations at the border. A judge previously ruled against a similar effort.

Since the 1990s, courts have implemented regulations on how children should be cared for in detainment, ABC News noted.

The proposal would arrive at a time when the Trump administration faces increasing scrutiny over the conditions at its migrant detention facilities. Many Democratic lawmakers voiced outrage earlier this summer over reports of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions in its facilities.