Trump's new family detention rule faces lawsuit

Attorneys general for 19 states and the District of Columbia sued U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on Monday to block a sweeping new rule to indefinitely detain migrant families seeking to settle in the United States.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, was the first in an expected flurry of litigation seeking to stop the rule, officially published on Friday, from taking effect in October.

However, the Trump administration's effort to overturn a two-decade-old legal settlement limiting how long migrant children can be detained is likely to face more than just legal hurdles.

Even if the courts allow the rule to take effect, there are also practical problems: paying for thousands of additional family detention beds.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only three family detention facilities — two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania — that have between 2,500 and 3,000 beds, Acting secretary of homeland security Kevin McAleenan said in announcing the new rule last week.

Record arrest rate  

More than 42,000 families, mostly from Central America, were arrested along the U.S. southern border just last month. The July arrest numbers are at record highs, even though they have dropped more than half compared with levels seen in May.

"Even if the number of border crossings doesn't go back up in the fall, all this [new rule] would enable them to do is to detain a relatively small percentage of the arriving families for longer," said Kevin Landy, a former ICE assistant director responsible for the Office of Detention Policy and Planning under the Obama administration.

Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for ICE, said the agency could not comment on potential increases to the agency's detention capacity.

The new rule seeks to scrap the 1997 agreement, known as the Flores settlement, which puts a 20-day limit on how long children can be held in immigration detention.

The court overseeing the settlement expanded its interpretation in 2015 to apply not just to unaccompanied children but also to children traveling with their parents.

Trump administration officials have said the detention limits have become a "pull" factor for migrants who bet that if they show up at the U.S.-Mexico border with a child and ask for asylum, they will be quickly let go to wait for a hearing in U.S. immigration court. Trump has decried this as a "catch-and-release" practice.

Without more space, that practice is likely to continue, Landy said.

"The longer they keep those families, the fewer new arrivals they can detain, which means the Border Patrol is releasing more people overall" while a small percentage of families suffer the impacts of prolonged detention, he said.

'Tighten the reins'

McAleenan last week said ICE's family facilities meet "high standards" including appropriate medical, educational, recreational and dining operations and private housing.

Setting up those types of "family residential centres," as the agency calls them, can be more expensive than facilities dedicated only to adults.

Congress mandates how much ICE can spend on immigration detention, and the 2019 budget has $2.8 billion earmarked to pay for 49,500 beds for solo adults — but only 2,500 beds for parents and children.

However, ICE is currently detaining more than 55,000 immigrants, a record high, a small percentage of them at family facilities, according to agency statistics.

The Department of Homeland Security has been able to stretch its budget by reprogramming funds from other areas to pay for more detention, but there are limits on how much money it can move without congressional approval.

Democrats in Congress are trying to put more limits on ICE's detention spending for the next fiscal year.

Congresswoman Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee, said the aim of proposed controls in the 2020 budget is to "tighten the reins on the administration's practice of transferring funds for purposes other than those intended by Congress, including the dramatic expansion of interior immigration enforcement."

ICE has also had a hard time finding communities willing to accept the construction of facilities in their backyards, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former policy adviser at U.S. Customs and Border Protection now at the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center.

It is also not clear how the family detention rule will work with another Trump administration policy pushing thousands of Central American families back to Mexico to wait out their U.S. court hearings there instead of in the United States, she said.

"They are putting out policies without having an operational plan in place," said Cardinal Brown. "It's a throwing-spaghetti-against-the-wall-type approach."