Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has issued a permanent injunction preventing the Department of Homeland Security from applying or enforcing the regulations it published last month to implement the settlement agreement in Flores v. Reno. Those regulations, which were due to take effect on October 22, would have allowed the government to detain minors apprehended with their parents or guardians beyond the 20-day limit that Judge Gee arbitrarily imposed in 2015.
That order has encouraged hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals to place themselves and their children at risk by immigrating illegally to the United States, harms detailed by the Bipartisan CBP Families and Children Care Panel in its Final Emergency Interim Report. It will ultimately be up to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court to reverse this ruling and give the Department of Homeland Security the tools that it needs to stem the tide of families surging over the border, which has already reached almost 458,000 aliens this fiscal year.