The Trump administration continues to mistreat children in a misguided effort to send a message to their parents. This is wrong, ineffective and unnecessary.

The administration recently released draft regulations to terminate the child welfare protections in the Flores Settlement Agreement, a court decision passed in 1997 that:

Limits the government's ability to indefinitely incarcerate immigrant children.

Requires licensing by state child protection authorities of facilities that hold them.

Requires the government to release children from immigration detention without unnecessary delay to parents, other adult relatives, or licensed programs.



Places children in the "least restrictive" setting appropriate to their ages and any special needs, if a suitable placement is not immediately available.

Holds the government responsible to implement standards relating to the care and treatment of children in immigration detention.



Terminating this agreement comes just months after the administration attempted to discourage illegal immigration by separating migrant families at the border, but then backed down because of the resulting uproar. As of last week, nearly 500 children were still in government-run shelters without their parents.

Bypassing the Flores Settlement is a fundamental change in the way our government treats immigrant children. The agreement was the conclusion of years of litigation. The proposed rules would set up a self-licensing scheme for the federal government where the current administration could certify its own detention facilities and allow for the indefinite incarceration of children with their parents.

The administration has already shown it is incapable of policing itself. What the administration is calling "legal loopholes" are actually basic standards for protecting children. The administration has already failed to protect children in federal detention even with Flores protections in place. Children regularly suffer cruel and abusive treatment in family detention facilities.

In July, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to remove children from a detention center that was using psychotropic drugs as a "chemical straitjacket." Toddler Marie Juarez died last month after inhumane and negligent treatment in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, where she was detained with her mother.

The Department of Homeland Security's own advisory committee recommended against the use of family detention and the detention of children, stating "detention is generally neither appropriate nor necessary for families."

Human Rights First's Eleanor Acer noted: "These proposed regulations are yet another shameless attempt to paint the indefinite incarceration of families — in facilities not even licensed by state child protection authorities — as somehow necessary to keep families together. Locking up families seeking refugee protection in immigration jails for months or longer is not a solution, it is just another humanitarian and political fiasco."

Detention is wholly unnecessary to ensure that refugee families attend their court hearings. On the contrary, families and children with legal counsel overwhelmingly appear in immigration court, with 97 percent of represented mothers whose cases were initiated in fiscal year 2014 complying with immigration court hearing obligations. Human Rights First has issued a report noting there are much more cost-effective solutions than to jail children.

The policy harms children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned that even a few days in immigration detention facilities is harmful to the health of children.

Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said that Flores' legal standards limiting the length of detention are the reason families are coming to the United States, but that ignores the reality on the ground. It is beyond dispute that the extreme levels of violence continue to drive migration from Central America. This is a refugee crisis and it's time we treated it as such.

Bill Holston is executive director of the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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