Judge may rule to end detention of families seeking asylum in US

A court ruling is expected in the coming days after a group of immigrant families sued the U.S. government over its detention of women asylum-seekers and their children.

Thousands of undocumented women and children from Central America arrived in the United States last year in an attempt to escape rising violence in countries including El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — which have some of the world’s highest homicide rates and face rising gang violence.

After the waves of arrivals, the U.S. began holding large numbers of women and children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania in the summer of 2014. The move outraged immigrant rights advocates, who said it was illegal to detain people seeking asylum.

Los Angeles-based U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee, who is hearing the immigrant families’ lawsuit, issued a tentative ruling on April 24, saying the policy of detaining the women and children likely violated a 1997 court decision that concluded the practice was illegal.

In that case, Flores v. Meese — over the detention of children arriving in the U.S. without a parent and having no local guardian to whom they can be released — it was ruled that they must be held in the least restrictive environment possible. Rights advocates have argued the immigrant detention centers do not meet that standards.

In the families’ lawsuit, Gee gave the two sides 30 days, until May 24, to negotiate an agreement. If they are unable to do so, the judge has indicated she would likely rule that the families must be released, NPR reported. The Obama administration could decide to release just the children, or all families seeking asylum — or it could change the way it houses those families, the NPR report added.

But legal experts said it is not legal to detain asylum-seekers unless they pose a threat to the public.

Carl Shusterman, an immigration attorney based in Los Angeles, told Al Jazeera that when someone applies for asylum — even after entering the country unlawfully and being in removal proceedings — the person is supposed to be released until there is a hearing on the case. If immigration authorities deem it doubtful that the person would appear for the hearing, a bond would be set for his or her release, the attorney added.

“The only people that immigration would keep without bond are people that might be a danger to the community, like someone who had a serious felony conviction or a mentally ill person who might do something terrible,” Shusterman said. “We’re talking about women and children, so that’s obviously not the case.”

Conditions at ICE immigrant detention centers have been widely criticized by human rights and immigrant advocacy groups, many of which have also called the detention of asylum-seekers unlawful. 

In a statement to Al Jazeera, an ICE spokesperson defended the centers. 

The centers "currently operate in an open environment that includes play rooms, social workers, educational services, comprehensive medical care, and access to legal counsel," the spokesperson said on condition of anonymity.

"ICE will explore ways to further enhance these conditions," the spokesperson said, adding that ICE recently bolstered "oversight" for the centers to "increase transparency" and ensure the safety of families living there. 

Nevertheless, Philadelphia-based organization Vamos Juntos cited a list of abuses alleged to have taken place in the centers. The group rejected the possibility of simply upgrading the detention centers, and called for an end to the detention of families seeking asylum.

“Unlawful imprisonment cannot be remedied by making the unlawful imprisonment more humane,” Matthew Archambault, an immigration attorney, said in a Vamos Juntos news release. “ICE is engaging in illegal and immoral activity and no matter how many swings are put out in the playground or how many toys are placed in the play area, this type of detention is illegal and immoral.”

Human Rights Watch said last month that the indefinite detention of asylum-seeking mothers and children in the U.S. takes a “severe psychological toll.”

“The Obama administration has now kept traumatized children and their mothers locked up for nearly a year,” Clara Long, U.S. researcher at HRW said in a press release on May 15. “They have no idea when they will be released, and they are terrified to be deported back to places where they could be killed, raped, or otherwise harmed."

One such mother and child, Cristina and her 12-year-old son Josué, left Honduras after gang members began threatening their lives. Cristina is a single mother, and said she feared what might happen to her son if she was killed.

“I had to decide to save my life,” Cristina told Al Jazeera, adding that if she had stayed in Honduras, Josué “would be exposed to many things — to gangs, abuse, rape.” Cristina and Josué’s names have been changed for this article because they said they fear retribution from Honduran gangs against family members who remain in the country.

Cristina said that the journey to the U.S. was difficult, and that she and Josué had spent some nights in the mountains. She emphasized that she did not come to the U.S. for better opportunities, but because she feared for her life and that of her son.

“The truth is I didn’t come focused on what I was going to do here. I came because I was fleeing my country,” Cristina said. “I didn’t have a perspective of what this country was going to be — I only wanted to distance myself from that country, from death.”

The Obama administration has deported a record number of undocumented immigrants — nearly 2 million — but has at the same time has pushed for more leniency toward unauthorized children.  

A 2012 executive action blocked the deportation of undocumented children who arrived in the U.S. before they were 16 years old and had been in the country for more than five years. Because of that stipulation, the order did not address the current crisis of families fleeing Central America.

Shusterman, the immigration attorney, said the policy since the summer of 2014 of locking up women and children asylum-seekers was likely done out of political considerations, rather than anything logical.

"I'm very disappointed that the [Obama] administration would do this and I frankly don't see a lot of people in Congress protesting this either," Shusterman said. "I see some but they tend to be the very liberal Democrats, while others say if we put them in jail and make them stay there for months it will probably discourage others from coming — that seems to be the bottom line."

Meanwhile, a group of women and children asylum-seekers detained in an ICE facility in Pennsylvania have called for their release for their human rights to be respected.

“We have come to this country with our children in search of refuge and we have passed our credible fear interview so we then wonder why when we appear before an immigration judge we are denied our right to bond (to be free),” the women wrote in a statement included in a press release by Vamos Juntos.

“We deserve to be treated with dignity and to have our human rights respected … we do not wish to be detained in this camp any longer. As mothers we ask that you help us and hope that our stories touch your hearts, for our children’s sake,” the women added.

With additional reporting by Erica Pitzi