A federal judge said on Wednesday that when the government detains migrants, it's responsible for them, even if they haven't gone through the formal process.
The number of people crossing the border from Mexico to Southern California has been too much for local detention facilities, so thousands have been camping in the desert for days.
In a case called Flores v Garland, civil rights groups sued for migrant children living in the camps, claiming they were in “inhumane” conditions.
The U.S. Border Patrol didn't really argue that the conditions weren't good. Instead, it argued that the court didn't have the right to make them responsible for the children, as they hadn't processed them.
Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court of Central California strongly disagreed with that argument.
Judge Gee admitted that the agency may not have meant for the temporary camping sites to become crowded with thousands of migrants.
But she said that since the minors were in the agency’s legal custody, the agency had to take care of them.
The current case is based on a decision from 27 years ago, which said that the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for providing housing to “all minors who are detained in the legal custody” of the agency.
Judge Gee decided that it didn't matter that the children hadn't been formally processed. They were held in a fenced area and the agency had control over their health and welfare, so the agency had to take care of them.
The court found that Customers and Border Protection (CBP) mostly controls the provision of things like drinking water and handwashing stations at the camping sites, as well as porta-potties and dumpsters, which weren't serviced often.
Volunteers told the court that the water and handwashing stations were poorly maintained — the handwashing stations had trash and dirty spigots, as reported by Gee.
The camps are generally in bad conditions, surrounded by the border wall, train tracks, desert and mountains.
Temperatures can be very high in the summer and very low in the winter, with little shelter except for brush that the migrants burn to keep warm at night, according to Gee.
While volunteer groups try to provide food, clothing and sanitation services, there isn't enough to meet the need at the open air detention site, the court found.
The national standards for migrant detention say that kids should get a meal every six hours and two hot meals per day, but migrants in the detention sites generally only get “one bottle of water and one pack of crackers” each day, according to the court.
Also, Gee discovered that the dumpsters and portable toilets are not cleaned often enough and are not flowing properly.
This means that the open-air detention sites not only smell bad, but also have trash scattered around, and migrants have to go to the bathroom outside.
Gee found that all of this violated immigration authorities' obligation under the 1997 Flores decree to keep minors in safe and clean facilities.
CBP providing services that were insufficient for the minors' needs doesn't mean they didn't have the minors in custody, because the migrants can't leave, Gee wrote in the ruling.
Upon arrival, migrants are given a dated wristband; when they ask to leave for food and water, CBP officers refuse, and if they do leave, Border Patrol brings them back, as noted in the decision.
After establishing that the children at these camps are in U.S. custody, the court found plenty of evidence that the care they were receiving is not suitable for minors.
Lastly, the court found that CBP was not processing migrants as rapidly as possible, although Gee declined to set a strict limit on the processing time.
However, she cautioned that the agency's failure to process minors promptly would result in further measures by the court.
