Judge questions Border Patrol stand that it’s not required to care for children at migrant camps
SAN DIEGO– A federal judge on Friday sharply questioned the Biden administration’s position that it has no responsibility for housing and feeding migrant children as they wait in makeshift camps along the US-Mexico border.
The Border Patrol does not dispute conditions in the camps, where migrants wait under the open sky or sometimes in tents or structures made of tree branches while short of food and water. The migrants, who have crossed the border illegally, wait there for Border Patrol agents to arrest and process them. The question is whether they have been legally taken into custody.
That would impose a 72-hour limit on how long children can be held and would require emergency medical services and guarantees of physical safety, among other things.
U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee said evidence presented by immigrant advocacy groups appeared to support the definition of lawful custody. “Are they free to leave?” she asked.
“As long as they don’t move further into the United States,” replied Justice Department lawyer Fizza Batool.
Gee, who was appointed by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, acknowledged that it was complicated — “like dancing on the head of a pin” — because some children arrive at the camps alone and are not sent there by Border Patrol agents.
Advocates are trying to enforce a 1997 court-supervised settlement over custody terms for migrant children, which includes time limits and services including restrooms, sinks and temperature checks. Gee made no ruling after a half-hour hearing in Los Angeles.
Unaccompanied children must be turned over within 72 hours to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which generally releases them to family in the United States while an immigration judge considers asylum. Asylum-seeking families in the U.S. are typically released while their cases move through the courts.
The legal challenge focuses on two areas in California: one between two border fences in San Diego and another in a remote mountainous area east of San Diego. When the number of migrants was particularly high last year, they waited several days before being arrested and processed by overwhelmed Border Patrol agents. From May to December, officers handed out colored wristbands to determine who should be processed first.
Advocates say the Border Patrol often sends migrants to the camps, and sometimes even drives them there. Officers are often seen in the area keeping a loose watch until buses and vans arrive.
The Justice Department, which rejects the label “open-air detention centers,” says smugglers send migrants to camps. It says officers giving them water and snacks is a humanitarian gesture and that any officer sending or even escorting migrants there “is no different than any law enforcement officer directing traffic to prevent disorder and disorder.”
The Border Patrol typically apprehends migrants in the camps within 12 hours of encountering them, compared to 24 hours last year, Brent Schwerdtfeger, a senior official in the agency’s San Diego sector, said in a court filing. The agency has more than doubled the number of buses in the San Diego area to 15 for faster processing.
On Friday, 33 migrants, including two small children, waited between the border walls in San Diego for agents to come and ask them to empty their pockets, untie their shoelaces and submit to weapons searches before being taken in vans to a holding station. They came mainly from China and India, others from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Officers spoke to them in English.
Pedro Rios, a volunteer with the American Friends of Service Committee, delivered turkey sandwiches and hot tea and coffee through spaces in the border wall. He gave painkillers and ointment to a limping Chinese woman who had fallen from the wall.
Kedian William, 38, said she left a 10-year-old daughter with relatives in Jamaica because she could not afford the trip, including the flight to Mexico, but that asthma would still have made the trip difficult for her child. She planned to seek asylum and settle with family in New York after fleeing her home after her sister-in-law and her sister-in-law’s husband and their child were murdered last year.
William said she tried to reach the camp on Wednesday but fled back to Tijuana to evade pursuit by Mexican authorities. She tried again a day later and waited six hours on U.S. soil until agents could pick her up for processing.