BORDER/CHILDREN/IMMIGRATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump is pushing changes in immigration laws to make it easier to jail and quickly deport children who cross the border illegally. He also wants to make it harder to pursue asylum. To him, these are legal ‘loopholes’ that Congress needs to close to stop illegal immigration. But these proposals are even harder to enact than his controversial border wall, in the face of widespread Democratic and some Republican opposition…This month, the Trump administration announced it would separate migrant children from their families so that parents can be jailed and prosecuted for crossing the border illegally. Administration officials say they wouldn’t have to do that if the laws were changed. The Obama White House, faced with a surge of child and family migrants, proposed some of the same policy changes. In 2014, as the number of children and families arriving at the southwest border soared, the administration decided to jail families, rather than release them into the country with instructions to appear at a court hearing later. That practice generally came to an end when a federal court ruled that jailing children for more than about 20 days, even with their parents, violated a 1997 court settlement known as the Flores agreement, which resulted from an earlier court challenge to government procedures around the detention and treatment of children. Now the Trump administration wants Congress to overturn the Flores agreement so it can resume family detention. Absent that, it says it has no choice but to separate families so that the adults can be jailed and prosecuted.”
– Laura Meckler, “Trump Presses Congress to Allow Fast Deportations, Jailing for Children,” The Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2018 2:30 pm