The Trump administration does not want unaccompanied minor immigrant children to be represented in court. A federal judge blocks its latest brutal action with a TRO.
The administration seems to be trying to see how immoral and brutal it can be. Fortunately, there is growing pushback to what is basically pure evil.
Back in 2018, a number of media outlets reported on the case of Johan, a one-year-old child who landed in U.S. Immigration Court in Phoenix. Johan was all alone, except for an immigration attorney who had been appointed to represent him. Johan had become separated from his father when the latter voluntarily left the United States for his home country of Honduras, thinking that Johan would be going with him.
It was the height of the first Trump administration’s brutal policy of separating families, and the assumption Johan’s father made was wrong. Also present in the courtroom that day was an unaccompanied Guatemalan boy dressed in a vest and tie who held up five fingers when the judge asked his age, and a shy seven year old girl in a pink bow and dress, according to media reports.
These children had attorneys because U.S. law mandates that the government pay for legal representation for unaccompanied minors, one way or another. That law, called the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), was passed in 2008, an update of earlier legislation that Congress had passed back in 2000. Most recently, Congress has appropriated funds to carry out the law’s mandate until at least September 30, 2027.
(William Wilberforce, as some here might know, was a major figure in the British anti-slavery movement. The TVPRA was aimed in large part at combatting the trafficking of children as they moved between national borders.)
But on March 21 of this year, without any warning, the U.S. Department of the Interior sent a notice to the numerous legal organizations across the country currently contracted to provide these attorneys to “immediately stop work” on their cases, including for children that were scheduled to appear in court the very next day.
So on March 26, the Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto, California, along with ten other plaintiff organizations that provide legal aid and other services to immigrants, sued the Department of the Interior and other government departments involved to reverse the decision. On April 1, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the Northern District of California issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the government’s action, pending briefings and hearings on a full preliminary injunction.
The judge’s reasoning was simple, and followed the basic legal principles for granting a TRO: The plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their lawsuit; they would suffer irreparable harm if the status quo were not preserved in the meantime; the balance of fairness and justice is in favor of the plaintiffs; and an injunction is in the public interest.
I’ve linked to the Complaint above, and as always I suggest reading it. The Complaint gives a number of examples of the kinds of children these organizations are dedicated to representing. For example, the plaintiff Immigrant Defenders Law Center is currently representing “a 16-year old girl and her one-year-old son… Beginning at the age of six years old, the girl was sex trafficked by her family in Mexico. After giving birth to her son, she fled to the U.S. to save him from the same fate.”
Note that the TVPRA in no way requires immigration judges to allow these minor children to stay in the United States. All it does is guarantee that they have legal representation so that their interests and rights can be defended. But even this was too much for the Trump administration, which has shown in so many recent and sometimes more publicly reported cases that it has nothing but contempt for the due process requirements of the U.S. Constitution.
It is hard to add anything to what so many have already said about this atrocious attitude. In this case, the Trump administration simply violated the law, perhaps thinking that no one would care enough to challenge its action. But a more likely explanation, also proffered by many commenters on the excesses of this government, is that the administration is simply trying to see how far they can push things, and trying to exhaust the resources and energies of its opponents.
More basically, Trump and his supporters have demonstrated that they have no morals, no principles, and no ethics. It makes me laugh every time I hear or see someone (a MAGA cult follower, quite often) refer to “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) or “virtue signaling” every time someone rises up to protest what is being done in this country. It’s as if those who have no morals at all are somehow morally superior. Or is it just that MAGA cult followers want the rest of us to be as immoral and cravenly cruel as they are?
Fortunately, as yesterday’s mass actions across the country demonstrate, those who do have a moral compass are not willing to cast it down, and they know full well in which direction it points.
“Justice will win — because might does not make right, and the only path to lasting peace is when people know that their dignity will be respected and that their rights will be upheld. And citizens, like nations, will never settle for a world where the big are allowed to bully the small. Sooner or later, they fight back.” —Barack Obama
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