The judge will hear arguments later this month on whether he should order the administration to track down all the separated families
By Maria Sacchetti Maria Sacchetti Reporter covering immigrant communities and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Email Bio Follow March 8 at 10:11 PM In a legal blow to the Trump administration, a federal judge ruled Friday that all migrant families separated during the government’s border crackdown should be included in a class-action lawsuit. But he stopped short of immediately ordering the Justice Department to track them all down.
“The hallmark of a civilized society is measured by how it treats its people and those within its borders,” he wrote in a 14-page ruling. “That Defendants may have to change course and undertake additional effort to address these issues does not render modification of the class definition unfair; it only serves to underscore the unquestionable importance of the effort and why it is necessary .”
Otherwise, he wrote, parents may have been deported without their children, creating the “very real possibility of a permanently orphaned child” because of the “questionable” actions of government officials.The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the parents in the lawsuit, cheered the decision and said it would ask Sabraw to order the Trump administration to provide the names and contact information of all the separated families, as it did for the ones split up last spring.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions opted to criminally prosecute all adults who crossed the border illegally, even if they were with children. Adults were detained, and their children were shuttled to shelters across the country. Almost all the families had been reunited when the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services issued the report in January that surprised Sabraw and the ACLU. The report estimated that “thousands” of other children may have been taken from their parents, including from July 1, 2017, to November 2017, during a trial run of the crackdown in west Texas and New Mexico. Until then, the ACLU had heard of only a few such cases.
The ACLU has noted that many parents hail from remote villages in Guatemala and other Central American nations and would face severe difficulties in finding their children.
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