With the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump has won the greatest judicial victory of his presidency so far. But as the dust settles at the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is still entangled in numerous legal fights over its immigration policies, ranging from family detention and asylum restrictions to refugee admissions and immigrant access to public benefits. And on that front, it’s making some serious progress with its “zero tolerance” agenda.
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Suffer the Children: The family separations that resulted from Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy of taking immigrant children away from their parents at the border has faded from public consciousness, ever since the government declared—inaccurately—that it had reunified all “eligible” children with their families. But a new report from the Associated Press indicates that migrant families still may be at risk of permanent separation: State court judges are granting custody of separated migrant children to American foster families, without notifying their parents. In cases dating back to the Obama administration, reporters found that children separated from their parents under “zero tolerance” could end up being permanently adopted.
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Punished for Poverty: The Trump administration on Wednesday finally published a a 447-page proposal that would allow federal officials to deny permanent residency to immigrants who might be likely to use Medicaid, food stamps, or public housing in the future—including those who have used such resources while legally residing in the United States. Advocates say that the proposal has already produced a chilling effect on the use of benefits to which immigrants and their citizen relatives are legally entitled. “It’s not a surprise that this is causing further panic among immigrant communities,” Tanya Broder, a senior staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, told The Daily Beast. “These are very uncertain times, and that fear has a real public health and economic effect on all of us. We expect that many will avoid going in to get the services that they need—and for which their children are eligible—because of this fear and uncertainty.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said that the policy would “promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.”
Justice Isn’t Blind: Kavanaugh heard oral arguments in his first major immigration case as a Supreme Court justice, Nielsen v. Preap, which seeks to resolve the question of whether the government can detain immigrants with past criminal records without a hearing during their deportation proceedings. The policy has resulted in a massive increase in immigrant detention. Republicans argue the government needs “broad power to detain” in order to prevent a custody gap that would allow undocumented immigrants to evade deportation. In oral arguments, the government’s attorneys argued that the Department of Homeland Security could detain immigrants—legal or undocumented—for up to 50 years after conviction for traffic violations or minor drug offenses. Meanwhile, the ACLU has called the government’s actions “a draconian response to an imaginary problem. Reporters in the courtroom describe Kavanaugh as “skeptical” of the ACLU’s argument.
Bearing the Cost: President Trump’s campaign promise to deport three million undocumented immigrants from the United States is a far cry from reality, but his administration has burned through a small fortune hoping to make it happen. Yahoo News found that hundreds of millions in government dollars have been pulled from programs intended to fund cancer research, HIV prevention, and Head Start programs in order to build “tent city”-style detention centers for migrant children. The average cost per head: $750 per night, roughly the price of an Executive Room at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Safe Haven: While many of the consequences of “zero tolerance” have yet to be resolved, one aspect of the plan’s slapdash implementation may finally be rectified. Under an agreement negotiated by the Department of Justice, migrant parents who failed their “credible fear” interviews due to the stress of their children being taken from them will have a second chance to make their case that they have a reasonable fear of returning to their home countries.
“This agreement would give many families a second chance at seeking asylum and leaves open the possibility for some deported parents to return to the United States,” Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said of the agreement. “The Trump administration will never be able to erase the full damage of its family separation policy, but this agreement is an important step toward restoring and protecting the asylum rights of impacted children and parents going forward.”
The agreement could save scores of parents from being returned to countries where they face death at the hands of gangs, violent former partners, or in the case of one woman profiled by The Daily Beast, both.
Families Are Still Separated: Nearly three months have passed since a court-ordered deadline to reunify thousands of immigrant children separated from their families, yet hundreds of kids still remain separated from their parents. Roughly 350 children have yet to be reunified with their families, according to the ACLU, with only half of them being on track to eventually get back to their parents. The others are not eligible, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, because their parents have criminal histories, cannot be located, or have already been deported.
