The US government will soon adopt policies to avoid splitting migrant children from their parents at the border and take new steps to reunite those separated under a Trump-era policy.
Senior administration officials announced the plans Monday as part of a long-awaited proposed settlement with migrant families who challenged the “zero tolerance” policy then-President Donald Trump’s administration adopted to deter unauthorized border crossings by separating parents systematically.
The agreement, if approved by a federal judge, will close an emotional chapter of litigation over the Trump policy, which prompted outrage from across the political spectrum.
“By providing services to these families and implementing polices to prevent future separations, today’s agreement addresses the impacts of those separations and helps ensure that nothing like this happens again,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that thousands of children were separated from their parents from 2017 to 2021. DHS has reunited more than 700 so far and is working on other cases, a senior official said.
The proposed settlement bars future family separations, except for limited reasons such as national security, for eight years and extends an immigration parole process that allows separated family members to come to the US to reunite.
“Although no settlement can ever erase this tragic episode, the settlement is a critical step forward to help the thousands of families that were so brutally separated by the Trump administration,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement Monday.
The ACLU represents families affected by the Trump-era policy. A separate dispute continues over whether the federal government owes them monetary compensation.
Monday’s proposed deal is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of California.
The case is Ms. L. v. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, S.D. Cal., No. 3:18-cv-00428
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