The Biden administration and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a plan Monday to settle a class-action lawsuit brought over the Trump administration’s family-separation policy. Despite president Joe Biden’s assertion that separating families at the border is “abhorrent,” court documents filed in September allege the current administration has also engaged in the practice.
United States District Judge Dana Sabraw, who ordered the Department of Homeland Security to reunite separated migrant families in 2018, will review the agreement in a December hearing and is expected to approve the plan.
If Sabraw does indeed green-light the settlement, the U.S. government will provide the separated families a unique asylum process, allowing them to apply before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) rather than arguing in front of a Department of Justice immigration judge. The USCIS administrators ruling on the asylum application would then be required to consider the effect of having been separated on those families during the hearing, and applicants who can demonstrate that they came to the U.S. to avoid persecution may be eligible for permanent residency within the country.
Families to which the agreement applies will also be able to access federal housing assistance and medical treatment.
On a broader policy level, if the settlement is approved, U.S. border officials will be prohibited from using parents’ illegal status as a reason to part them from their children, which will only be considered an acceptable action under certain circumstances, a senior Justice Department official said.
“The fact that someone enters the United States unlawfully is not a basis for future separation,” the official told reporters at a briefing Monday. “It’s only if somebody has committed a serious felony offense that future separations will be permitted.”
News of the settlement comes after a period in which the Biden administration was said to have been considering monetary reparations for families separated at the border in 2018. Biden signed a group of executive orders in 2021 creating a task force to reunite the separated families and beginning a review of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.