When the federal government detains migrants, it is liable for them, regardless of whether they have been legally processed, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
As migrant crossings between Mexico and Southern California have overrun local jail facilities, thousands of individuals have been forced to sleep in the desert, sometimes for days.
In the case at hand, Flores v. Garland, civil rights organizations sued on behalf of migrant children living in the camps, claiming they were being confined in “inhumane” conditions.
The United States Border Patrol overwhelmingly agreed that the conditions were inadequate. Instead, it said that the court lacked jurisdiction over the agency on this matter since it had not formally assumed care for the children by processing them.
Judge Dolly Gee of the United States District Court for the Central District of California flatly rejected the proposition.
The government may not have planned for temporary camping camps to become filthy open air detention sites “collectively holding thousands of migrants,” Gee said.
However, she said that the situation has “evolved such that the minors held there” are in the agency’s legal custody, making it accountable for their care.
At the heart of the current lawsuit is the 27-year-old Flores v. Sessions ruling, which established that the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for providing accommodation to “all minors who are detained in the legal custody” of the agency.
Gee ruled that it did not matter that the children had not been legally processed: They were confined in a walled location to which they were forcibly returned if they attempted to flee, by an entity with “decision-making authority over [their] health and welfare,” she said in her finding.
The court determined that Customers and Border Protection (CBP), for example, “largely controls the provision” of necessities such as drinking water and handwashing stations at camping sites, as well as portable toilets and dumpsters, which Gee noted were “quickly filled and infrequently serviced.”
Volunteers informed the court that the water and handwashing stations were also in bad condition; at a recent inspection, “the handwashing stations had been filled with trash and the spigots to the water stations [were] dirty,” Gee wrote.
That overburdened infrastructure is part of the overall bleak situation. The camps are an archipelago of rocky, arid quadrangles bounded by the border wall, train tracks, desert, and mountains.
Temperatures in the dry air can reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and drop to 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, with little shelter other than “various forms of brush that the migrants try to burn to keep warm at night,” according to Gee.
While volunteer groups attempt to give food, clothing, and sanitation services to detainees in the open-air detention camp, “the need outpaces their ability to provide this assistance,” the court determined.
National regulations for migrant custody require children to be fed every six hours, with two hot meals per day; in general, migrants in detention sites are given “one bottle of water and one pack of crackers” per day, according to the court.
Furthermore, the insufficiently abundant and infrequently cleaned dumpsters and portable toilets “are unflowing and unusable,” according to Gee.
“This means that the [open-air detention sites] not only have a foul smell, but also that trash is strewn about, and [migrants] are forced to relieve themselves outdoors.”
All of this, Gee said, violated immigration authorities’ responsibility under the 1997 Flores agreement to retain “minors in facilities that are safe and sanitary.”
The mere fact that CBP provided services — or that those services were inadequate for need — does not establish that they held the kids in “custody,” unless the migrants are unable to depart, Gee wrote in the opinion.
When migrants arrive, they are given a wristband with a date; when they ask CBP officials if they can leave to acquire food and water, they are told no, she stated in the ruling. Additionally, “if an individual does leave [the site], Border Patrol brings them back.”
After determining that the children at these camping sites are in U.S. custody, the court discovered “abundant evidence” that the care they were receiving “is not adequate for minors.”
Finally, the court determined that CBP “had not been processing [migrants] as expeditiously as possible,” though Gee declined to set a clear deadline for how long they might take to process them.
However, she warned that the agency’s “failure to process minors in a reasonably expedited manner” will result in “further remedial measures” from the court.