After eliminating legal services funding for tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors, the Trump Administration has now decided that its own lawyers will represent these children in immigration court. The Department of Health and Human Services quietly announced last week the creation of a new Unaccompanied Alien Children Legal Representation Division that will work towards “safely reuniting these children with their families”. But in an administration that has repeatedly shown great hostility towards immigrants of any age, this new arrangement presents grave questions about conflict of interest and whether these attorneys will be fighting for the children they represent or the government that employs and directs them. As one advocate put it, this new division, “will only give HHS new opportunities to forsake children’s rights and well-being.”
Late last month, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to share data from the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database with state election officials. The 40-year old SAVE system was created to verify eligibility for federal benefits, but the administration wants states to upload their voter rolls to the system to verify voter eligibility, something the system was not designed to do. A federal judge had blocked the administration expanding the use of SAVE, finding that it violated a number of laws, but the conservative members of the Supreme Court disagreed. The Trump Administration has been on a major crusade to purge voter voter rolls, but has come up with scant evidence to show that noncitizen voting is a real problem. In one example, DHS claimed in July that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered to vote, but could only come up with a list of 185 suspected noncitizens. After Nevada officials reviewed that list, they found that all 185 were actually citizens.
The Supreme Court started its new term this past Monday and has agreed to hear two new cases related to immigration. The first case will examine whether the administration’s mandatory detention policy is legal. Over 500 district Court Judges and 9 Circuit Courts have ruled against the administration on the issue, but 2 Circuit Courts agreed with the administration creating a conflict that the Supreme Court must now resolve. In the second case, the Court will look at whether the administration’s deportations to 3rd countries is legal. The administration has already deported more than 25,000 people to 3rd countries, and the Court recently allowed the practice to continue until they decide on the issue.
Attorneys General from around the country scored a major legal victory over the Trump Administration last month when a federal judge struck down a number of policies targeting immigrant access to benefits. 20 states, including Massachusetts, had sued the administration last summer to block a set of coordinated policies coming out of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, Justice, and Education which dramatically reinterpreted the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), a 1990s law that restricted eligibility for certain federal benefits. The court’s ruling from last month helps protect access to programs such as Head Start, family planning, food banks, community health centers, and much more.
ICE has once again issued a directive to increase daily arrests to 3,000, an increase of 1,000 from current arrest goals. ICE had aimed for 3,000 arrests per day early in the Trump Administration, but that goal quietly fell as the American public strongly objected to the militarized tactics the DHS used to achieve it. Civil arrests have already been creeping back up in recent months; ICE arrested 46,000 people in July and 51,000 in August, both monthly records under the Trump Administration.
