Last night, a federal judge in San Diego granted a preliminary injunction requested by the American Civil Liberties Union. Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered that all families separated at the border by the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy be reunited within 30 days, 14 days for children under 5. Parents must be allowed to speak to their children by phone within 10 days.
“The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance—responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government’s own making. They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our constitution,” wrote (pdf) U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw. “This is particularly so in the treatment of migrants, many of whom are asylum seekers and small children.”
The Trump administration’s family separation policy was implemented without any standards for adequately tracking detained children taken from their parents, so as Sabraw noted, the “startling” and “unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”
In addition to setting deadlines for reunification, Sabraw also issued a nationwide injunction to block officials from separating any more families—unless a parent “affirmatively, knowingly, and voluntarily declines to be reunited with the child…or there is a determination that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child”—and mandated that the government establish phone contact between separated children and their parents within 10 days.
Sabraw, 59, was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. The judge’s mother was a Japanese immigrant; his father served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. The couple married in Yokohama, Japan, before moving to San Rafael, Calif.
The opinion and order:
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