Alma Yanira Cruz was just 12-years-old when federal immigration officials kept her jailed for weeks inside a motel room. It was crowded, and some of the migrants detained with her were adults. “No schooling, no recreation, no doctors, no visits with relatives.” The year was 1985, and the Flores Agreement, a court settlement that protects vulnerable migrant kids who are in U.S. custody, did not yet exist.
Nearly 40 years later, the Trump administration has announced a new rule seeking to terminate this landmark settlement, which was the result of a class-action lawsuit that included Alma and a number of other children abused by Reagan administration officials. Should the current administration be successful in terminating Flores, legal and medical professionals fear it could return already-vulnerable kids to 1985 conditions.
“When she was 16 years old, in 1985, Ana Maria Martinez Portillo was allegedly forced by immigration officials to strip and undergo an invasive body cavity search after meeting with her attorney in Laredo, Texas,” TIME reports. Advocates remember the same, “that immigration agents were doing body cavity searches on migrant children,” The New York Times reports. “They would look up a boy’s anus and a girl’s vagina,” said John Hagar, an attorney from the lawsuit.
The Trump administration has claimed that in place of the protections granted under Flores, it “would provide an unknown third party to oversee a facility's compliance with standards,” BuzzFeed News reports. But how can anyone trust the administration on the well-being of kids when federal immigration officials are also refusing to give detained families their shots ahead of flu season, even after at least three kids have died under U.S. watch in part from the flu?
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan claimed that kids and their families “will be housed at facilities that provide medical care,” including one Pennsylvania jail where “a medical wing has been built where families receive medical care including immunizations required to attend public schools.” But what he didn’t mention is that moms have described being sexually abused at family jails, including that Pennsylvania jail. Kids do not belong in detention, period, and that’s not just the opinion of immigration advocates, it’s the opinion of professionals.
Terminating Flores would be “a return to an era of indefinite detention of children, an era of no independent monitoring to make sure that children are treated with basic human dignity while in custody,” said Columbia University professor of law Elora Mukherjee. “The detention of children in these facilities is never in the best interest of children,” said Dr. Marsha Griffin, of the American Academy of Pediatrics Immigrant Health Special Interest Group. “Given [DHS’s] history of poor medical care, and lack of screening—to keep children longer, we will see more deaths of children.”