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Attorneys: A precedent’s been set for reuniting migrant kids with their parents.
Immigration lawyers don’t need to wait for an uncertain remedy out of a California court to reunite undocumented families separated at the border. Instead, they now have a model in Connecticut for proving that migrant children’s trauma needs to be addressed immediately.
Attorneys from Yale’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic and Connecticut Legal Services explained that model at a press conference Tuesday afternoon in one of the law school’s lecture halls.
The were referring to a court victory this past Friday, when a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite two children being held in Connecticut with their parents, who were being held in Texas.
If other law school clinics and legal aid organizations have the resources, they too might be able to convince judges that family separations are so traumatic that the federal government needs a greater remedy to fix them, the Connecticut attorneys said.
“Our argument in this case was that reunification alone was not enough,” said Muneer I. Ahmad, a professor at Yale Law School. “This is all about holding the government accountable for what it did. This is not an ordinary mop-up operation. These are the lives, the emotional well-being, the psyche of children, and that may well lead to a more extraordinary form of relief than we might otherwise expect to see.”
The American Civil Liberties Union had already filed a concurrent lawsuit in California on behalf of the parents wrenched away from nearly 3,000 kids. The judge there has ordered the federal government to reunify all families by July 26. But it’s unclear if the Trump administration’s idea of compliance is just locking kids up with their parents — if they’ll meet the deadline at all.
“What’s actually going to happen? Are the children going to be reunited with their families in long-term detention?” Ahmad asked. “Our argument was that the government, by virtue of having created this injury, was required to place the children in conditions that will allow them to heal. That was incompatible with placing them in long-term detention.”
By contrast, this litigation focused on the children’s rights.
Arguing that two kids were so irreparably harmed by being ripped away from their moms and dads, the lawyers convinced U.S. District Judge Victor Bolden to take an extra step. Giving kids a chance to heal from the trauma — “a harm,” Bolden ruled, that’s “likely to continue even after family reunification” — he allowed the kids to be released to their parents outside of federal custody, without even ankle monitors to keep track of their location.
Ahmad said that other states could replicate the “Connecticut model,” which he described as bringing lawyers, elected officials and advocates together “to make demands for justice inside and outside the courtroom.”
Tom Breen Photo
Immigrant rights supporters rally outside Bridgeport’s federal courthouse.
Over a month ago, J.S.R., a 9‑year-old boy from Honduras, and V.F.B., a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador, fled gang violence and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with their respective parents. But after being apprehended by immigration officials in Texas, the kids were separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy and shipped to a resettlement agency in Connecticut.
Last Friday, Judge Bolden, a former New Haven corporation counsel who lives in the Westville neighborhood, ruled that the federal government violated the two children’s constitutional rights to due process under the Fifth Amendment. Not wanting to duplicate the orders in the California case, he limited his preliminary injunction to remedies for “the trauma that Plaintiffs endured.”
On Monday, the two migrant children were reunited with their respective father and mother in an emotional meeting that left attorneys watching speechless. As one family drove down the highway, a lawyer recounted, V.F.B.’s mom looked out the car window at the green hills. “It is beautiful to be free,” the mom said.
Christopher Peak Photo
Muneer Ahmad: Kids’ trauma is “irreparable.”
Lawyers for the families and the government planned to talk by phone on Tuesday afternoon about what additional remedies might be necessary for the separation that Bolden found unconstitutional. Later, other attorneys will get involved in pressing the families’ asylum case to an immigration judge.
The successful case against family separations relied on an evaluation by Dr. Andrés Martin, a child psychiatrist, who offered evidence that both children were experiencing clear signs of acute post-traumatic stress disorder. The boy, J.S.R., “struggles to sleep, distrusts adults, and is depressed,” while the girl, V.F.B., “is tearful, avoidant, and has a blunted and flat affect,” Martin said.
Arguing for those children’s rights proved such a game-changer, Ahmad explained, because it allowed the lawyers to demonstrate the need for a judge’s immediate intervention — as they did within two weeks of filing the case.
“Every day matters,” he said. “While the government claims to be working to reunite children with their parents, each and every day of additional forced separation was doing immeasurable and irreparable harm to our clients and, therefore, an immediate remedy was required.”
Gov. Dannel Malloy: Send us more kids.
While Judge Bolden’s ruling might not carry weight in other courtrooms across the country, it does establish a precedent that could guide additional action within the state. For that reason, Gov. Dannel Malloy said — somewhat “facetiously” — that he’d welcome any other separated children to Connecticut.
“If the federal government wants to send other children that they continue to separate from their parents to any state, perhaps they should send them here so that we can have other similar cases decided in a similar way,” he said.
Ahmad said the Connecticut case is still early on in what he believes will be “a very large life cycle of litigation against the government.”
The next steps could include more cases about treating children’s trauma, like another California case asking for the Trump administration to pay for screenings for mental health services. Later on, litigation could challenge the government’s longstanding interpretation of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, an international treaty that the United States signed on to in 1967.
But Joshua Perry, deputy director of Connecticut Legal Services, cautioned that the litigation model would be tough to carry out, given fiscal realities. The funding legal aid groups receive is to protect immigrant rights is “virtually nonexistent,” he said. “The question of whether this is replicable depends, in some part, on our willingness as a community here in the state and elsewhere to stand up on behalf of fairness and equality for people come seeking freedom from fear and persecution.”
After the presser, Gov. Malloy said he was “unprepared” to answer questions about committing state funds to immigrants’ legal defense, as 11 local governments across the country have done.
Abolish ICE?
Vanesa Suarez: #AbolishICE.
Local immigration advocates proposed another way to deal with the family separations.
Vanesa Suarez, an organizer for Unidad Latina en Accion and the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance, took Judge Bolden’s recognition of children’s trauma further.
Arguing that country’s immigration policy has affected a generation’s well-being, she called for shutting down U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — a rallying cry on the left from which the governor quickly distanced himself.
“While we celebrate the reunification of these two children with their parents, the fight is not over. For decades, our migrant brothers and sisters have experienced various forms of violence at the hands of this government. We must acknowledge the pain that has been inflicted and the generational trauma that exists,” she said. “In his ruling, the judge acknowledged that there was an irreparable harm caused, and so I ask, ‘How can our people begin to heal when the government continues to terrorize our communities?’ That is why we say #AbolishICE.”
Without being asked, Malloy then remarked, “I’m not in total agreement with everything said up here.”
Watch the full press conference below:
Yale is awesome. Now that children's trauma is being addressed will it include the trauma that New Haven's children have endured for decades from the police shooting range in their community?