Re:GitHub and US Government Developers
by dragonwriter on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @03:02PM
(#21206684)
Asserting that ICE made that finding and stopped detaining children with parents together based on it is false. ICE didn't even make the decision to stop family detention, the US District Court for the Central District of California in 2015 (in a decision appealed to and upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2016), applying rules from the 1997 Flores settlement, prohibited extended detention of children with adults (and ICE continues to operate family detention facilities within the limits of that court order.) This did force separation in detention when extended, but this was actively mitigated for the remaining part of Obama’s term, IIRC, by ICE not detaining adults or their children for illegal entry alone when that would result in separation of parents from their children (they didn't stop immigration proceedings against them, just didn't detain them during the process, unless there were additional reasons.)
In fact, the reason ICE separates adults from children in the first place is to fight human trafficking and child abuse: they used to keep the children with their accompanying adults (who aren’t guaranteed to be their parents, which seems to be overlooked in these arguments), but they found that the children were being assaulted by the primary adult population, so they started creating child-only facilities to combat this.