FILE – In this Sunday, June 17, 2018 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who were taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas. On Wednesday, June 20, 2018, The Associated Press has found that stories circulating on the internet that President Barack Obama did not oversee the separation of 90,000 migrant children and their parents at the U.S. border are untrue. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP)

Probably the most emotional issue in the immigration debate is how to detain minor children apprehended with alleged parents. If they were American citizens and arrested the answer would be amazingly simple. The kids would go into foster care until the custodial parent was released. No one would really care about the separation of parent and child. But because we are dealing with illegal immigrants and there is a perfect storm of Trump-hate bringing together people who want open borders and people who despise and oppose Trump as part of “muh principles,” what should be a fairly routine action has been inflated into what we’re supposed to believe is a national scandal.

Central to that political fight is something known as the Flores Settlement Agreement (FSA).

The FSA, which is a consent decree between the US Justice Department and a class of plaintiffs lead by Jenny Lisette Flores, requires the government to hold minor detained illegals in the least restrictive setting. In Flores’s case, she had been held in a detention facility with adults of both sexes. The consent decree was never intended to be permanent but our black-robed overloards have seen it differently.

…The law actually requires that these people be detained under most circumstances and does not place a time constraint on the detention, nor does it make exceptions for children. The constraint on holding children in certain facilities emanated from a court settlement that began in the 1980s and crystalized in 1997 as a temporary arrangement until 45 days after government promulgates a permanent regulation defining the parameters of the holding facilities for children along safe and sanitary guidelines laid out in the settlement.

Until now, courts have lawlessly “legislated” a 20-day deadline for holding children without such certified facilities or else they have to be released. Moreover, Judge Dana Sabraw created a new edict last year contrary to law that children can’t be released alone once they come with an adult and that the adult must be released with them. Thus, the expansion of Flores and Sabraw’s ruling spawned the worst period of migration in our history, where primarily one adult would come with one child, the perfect scam.

Last night, the White House revealed–in a scoop to The Daily Caller–that the administration would roll out a rule change to eliminate the FSA.

The Trump administration is seeking to terminate the Flores settlement, an immigration-related court order that prevents most migrant family units from being held in detention centers for more than 20 days, the Daily Caller has learned.

Eliminating the Flores settlement would allow the U.S. government to hold migrant children and their families indefinitely while they await court proceedings. The 1997 Flores v. Reno decision by the Supreme Court laid out specific conditions under which unaccompanied migrant children could be held in detention, and was later expanded to place time restrictions on the detention of migrant children accompanied by family members.

The new rule is expected to be rolled out during a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press conference on Wednesday morning.

“The Administration is closing one of the legal loopholes that has allowed human traffickers and smugglers to exploit our vulnerabilities at the southern border,” a senior administration official told the Daily Caller. “President Trump has made it clear that he’s going to secure America’s border at all cost and this rule plays a vital role in the strategy to restore the integrity to our immigration system and our national security.”

Now it is official

(2/5) Today’s action addresses a court-imposed weakness in immigration law that prevented DHS from detaining a family together for more than 20 days and codifies critical commitments on the conditions for children in Federal care.

— Acting Sec. Kevin McAleenan (@DHSMcAleenan) August 21, 2019

(4/5) This rule implements the commitments of the Flores settlement. While we continue to seek legislative solutions, we must take administrative action to address the ongoing security and humanitarian crisis.

— Acting Sec. Kevin McAleenan (@DHSMcAleenan) August 21, 2019

(5/5) Keeping families together during immigration proceedings, & ensuring that asylum seekers w/ meritorious claims get resolution, are important steps to enhance the integrity of the system & extend protections to those that need them. See more here: https://t.co/fNibhnkxfH

— Acting Sec. Kevin McAleenan (@DHSMcAleenan) August 21, 2019

(Read the whole press release)

The left’s outrage meter is pegged in the red zone:

In a stunning escalation, the Trump administration announced Wednesday that it will abrogate a decades-old legal agreement in order to indefinitely detain immigrant families.

The proposed termination of what’s known as the Flores agreement is President Donald Trump’s most aggressive—and most legally suspect—attempt to circumvent legal protections for undocumented children since his disastrous “zero-tolerance” policy resulted in the separation of thousands of immigrant families.

This rule fulfills the requirements of Flores by agreeing that detention facilities will not be restrictive. In theory, this should be case closed. In reality, because the overseeing judge is in lawfare country in the Ninth Circuit, it will inevitably be delayed by court action. Ultimately, I believe the administration will prevail because the FSA really just requires the government to hold unaccompanied minors in the least restrictive setting and the various time limits are simply imposed by judges acting outside their authority but who have been kowtowed to by this an other administrations because of lack of imagination.

Daniel Horowitz, who is never quite happy with anything, points out the costs of this abrogation of authority on the part of the executive branch dating back to the Clinton Administration (if you want some real outrage dialed up to 11, give the link a click).

It’s truly difficult to overstate the evil that expanded Flores has done to our security, our fiscal solvency, and Latin American children. By creating a huge market incentive to exploit children for mass migration by adults, it has:

• Brought over 1 million Central Americans to our border over the past two years, saddling Americans with the cost of caring for them.
• Flooded our hospitals with endless medical bills paid for by taxpayers. Agents have taken 21,000 sick or injured illegal aliens to the hospital since January, consuming 250,000 agent man-hours. This includes those who came to the border specifically for the purpose of taxpayer-funded surgeries for long-term illnesses.
• Fueled the growth of MS-13 and other violent groups that grew as a result of young Central American teens coming under such irresponsible circumstances.
• Fueled the drug crisis by enriching the cartels, serving as a supply for drug runners, and being used as strategic diversions to bring in drugs and gangs.
• Tied down border agents, leaving very few patrolling the line, enabling dangerous criminal aliens to get into the country.
• Created an entire industry to traffic and steal children to be used as golden tickets.
• Caused countless children to be raped and abused by cartels and smugglers.
• Exposed agents, health care workers, and ultimately the American people to contagious diseases.
• Because of the artificial Flores deadline, some of the worst criminals are incentivized to take kids to the border and get released into the country because we don’t have time to vet them.

Indeed, even if the wave were to end today, we will likely be seeing the effects of the crime wave and fiscal cost for years to come.

But to gauge the significance of this you only have to look at the people who oppose it:

The government AGREED to protect kids under the Flores Agreement. It wasn’t doing enough then and isn’t doing nearly enough now. And now Pres. Trump wants to make indefinite detention and these terrible conditions legal. It’s a shameless abdication of our basic responsibilities.

— Sen. Patrick Leahy (@SenatorLeahy) August 21, 2019

I strongly support the Flores Settlement Agreement, which provides serious and significant protection for immigrant children. Any effort to eliminate it will be met with the most strenuous opposition we can mount. pic.twitter.com/obzFwc0n9m

— Senator Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) August 21, 2019

Today the Trump administration announced a plan to kill the Flores Settlement. This is the agreement that’s supposed to stop them from locking children up for longer than 20 days, and is meant to force the gov't to treat those in detention with basic human rights. #SaveFlores pic.twitter.com/rcSvvOjQJP

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) August 21, 2019

https://twitter.com/RepDianaDeGette/status/1164254632912314369

BREAKING: the Trump administration is terminating the Flores agreement and expanding indefinite detention of migrant families — a cruel, inhumane move that seeks to deter families fleeing horrendous situations. #SaveFloreshttps://t.co/84sssjvb9o

— OxfamAmerica (@OxfamAmerica) August 21, 2019

No idea why the Trump Administration believes the judge is giong to let this happen – The Flores Agreement Protected Migrant Children for Decades. It’s Under Threat. https://t.co/dwtN0veI3Q pic.twitter.com/V0MlJBkTcS

— (((Greg Siskind))) (@gsiskind) August 21, 2019

The termination of Flores, which provides for safe and sanitary conditions in detention, so that the administration can detain children and parents indefinitely, is exactly what it looks like: ethnic cleansing.https://t.co/YRXKnh0zoy

— Elizabeth C. McLaughlin 🩸🦷 (@ECMcLaughlin) August 21, 2019

Children who have already endured violence and persecution would be harmed even further by this policy. The Flores Agreement, which mandates that children could spend only up to 20 days in detention, must be allowed to stand to protect vulnerable toddlers, kids, and teens.”

— Amnesty International USA (@amnestyusa) August 21, 2019

Love the butthurt in this thread

Not sure that people are getting the depth here. The government is moving to terminate the Flores settlement agreement; the agreement that was the result of four Salvadoran girls in 1986 who sued the government for strip searching and detaining them with adults.

— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) August 20, 2019

If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions then our judiciary has constructed a 98-lane superhighway with a downhill 60-degree grade heading straight into the Ninth Circle and let the open borders advocates and corrupt judges fuel the car with nitromethane and hit the accelerator. Walking away from the FSA will not be quick and it will not be a panacea but it is at least an attempt to pop the drogue chute.

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