Senators grilled Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen about the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies, including its practice of detaining migrant children and families, at a hearing on Wednesday. The most jarring moment of the hearing was when Secretary Nielsen repeatedly refused to admit that her agency detains children. During the “Threats to […]
The Trump administration is holding a record level of 13,300 migrant children in its custody, forcing the government to shift hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure there is enough money and bed space in Health and Human Services (HHS) facilities. This increase is largely due to the administration’s new policies and not an indication […]
For the second time this year, a Border Patrol agent has been charged with murdering multiple people in Texas. Both agents were hired nearly a decade ago amidst a surge in staffing that backfired on U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in many ways, resulting in Congress passing an act to improve hiring practices. However, […]
In a tentative partial settlement agreement reached with lawyers representing parents and children who were separated as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, the government has agreed to give thousands of parents and children a second chance to seek asylum. Organizations have argued that parents were so traumatized by the separation from […]
The Pentagon recently announced that up to 4,000 National Guard troops will remain deployed on the U.S.-Mexico border through September 2019, following a 12-month extension authorized by Defense Secretary James Mattis. But the nature of the military service members’ work at the border—which is mostly menial labor—will still cost millions. The original deployment order, set […]
The Trump administration is proposing new regulations to indefinitely detain immigrant children at the border and keep them in unsafe conditions, creating a false choice between separating families or detaining children indefinitely. This misguided effort would continue the administration’s pattern of inflicting needless suffering on asylum-seeking children. The Flores Settlement Agreement (“Flores”) is a decades-old […]
In a blow to the Trump administration, a federal court in California recently allowed a class action lawsuit to move forward challenging U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) practice of turning away asylum seekers at the border. The lawsuit, Al Otro Lado v. Nielsen, was brought in 2017 by six individual asylum seekers and the […]