Defense teams fridayn the first demand for elegant action that opposes the Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of deporting young migrants from the southern border of the United States without giving them the opportunity to seek humanitarian refuge.
The lawsuit, directed through the American Civil Liberties Union and filed at the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., aims to prevent the border government from quoting a public emergency order of fitness to suspend legal safeguards created by Congress for young migrants detained without their parents. Guardians.
During the pandemic, Trump’s management temporarily deported tens of thousands of migrants and unauthorized asylum seekers from the U.S.-Mexico border, saying they could spread the coronavirus within the United States if they were treated and detained under normal immigration laws. At least 2,000 unaccompanied youth were deported under the policy of being placed in government-controlled shelters and allowed to apply for asylum or other deportation relief bureaucracy.
While Customs and Border Protection said its officials had carried out more than 109,000 abstract evictions along the southern border since March, the exact number of unaccompanied youth deported across the United States is unknown because the firm has refused to publish recent figures, which is a dispute. But statistics from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which Congress has tasked with caring for these minors, show that relatively few young migrants can remain in the United States because of the pandemic.
Last month, for example, officials along the U.S.-Mexico border made 2,506 unaccompanied minors. But 168 migrant children, less than 7% of all arrests, were transferred to the Refugee Resettlement Office in July, according to government knowledge received through CBS News. As a result of the decline in expulsions of border agents, the population of young migrants in the care of the refugee firm has declined dramatically, reaching less than 830 this week after reaching more than 3,500 by the end of March.
While the ACLU and other teams have filed several lawsuits in recent weeks on behalf of young migrants, the maxim has become debatable after immigration officials agreed to transfer the named plaintiffs to the U.S. refugee agency. Friday’s trial is the first to ask the district court in Washington, D.C., to block the use of the public fitness order to deport minors and certify all young migrants as members of the organization in the case.
“We present this action of elegance because the Trump administration has left us no choice, continually refusing to allow its unprecedented parallel immigration policy to be tested in court in an individual case,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU leader suggested in the case. in a report. “Politics is the ultimate ban on excessive asylum to date, ignoring all the ions that Congress has enacted since World War II to young people and those fleeing danger.”
The plaintiff in Friday’s trial is a 16-year-old indigenous boy from Guatemala that the border government seeks to deport under the order of public fitness, which was first issued in March through the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the ACLU, the boy, known by his initials P.J.E.S., fled his Mayan network after he and his circle of relatives gained death threats because of his father’s political views. The teenager, who according to the ACLU had also fled threats from gang members seeking to recruit him, headed north to locate his father, who lives in the United States. and is about to be deported.
Instead of moving unaccompanied youth to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which connects them with lawyers and child advocates as they seek to place them with the circle of family members in the United States, the Trump administration has placed many of them in hotels along the border without access to suggest and deport them to their home countries through deportation flights.
Advocates such as Karla Vargas, senior attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project, say this has made it difficult to challenge politics in court. “Immigration lawyers and nonprofits in South Texas have desperately tried to deport asylum seekers they find miraculously,” Vargas said. “No one has ever noticed anything like this.”
Management argued in court that young people seeking to deport under the Public Health Directive are not under the “legal custody” of the immigration government that physically apprehended them, but rather under the “legal custody” of CDC officials with which they never interact. American soil. Citing this argument, management lawyers said that young migrants are not under the historic covenant of Flores, which promises them access to a lawyer and demands their prompt release.
In its Friday lawsuit, the ACLU, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and Oxfam America argued that the administration’s century-old public fitness act for deporting migrants does not allow deportations. The law, first enacted in the last 19th century and recoded in the 1940s, authorizes the surgeon general to prohibit the “introduction of people or goods” that threatened to introduce a contagious disease into the United States.
The teams argued that the deportation of unaccompanied young migrants violated a 2008 anti-trafficking law that requires their immediate transfer to the refugee firm and protects them from accelerated deportations, as well as legislation providing them with humanitarian protections opposed to deportation, such as asylum.
Last June, a federal ruling passed by President Trump said the ACLU is likely to effectively argue that public fitness law does not authorize deportations. While CDC may simply delegate deportation authority to border authorities, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said powers fail to exceed legal promises created through Congress for unaccompanied children.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials responded to a request for comment on Friday’s trial.