The Trump Administration is in the process of changing the rules that will allow them to detain illegal immigrant families for extended periods of time, so they will not have to release them inside the country, which allows them to hide so they can remain in the country.
President Trump is determined to seal the border against illegal crossers but thanks to activist judges are hitting his head against a stone wall.
The question becomes if he must be forced into an agreement that he didn’t make.
The announcement is expected to be made sometime on Wednesday.
“The Administration is closing one of the legal loopholes that has allowed human traffickers and smugglers to exploit our vulnerabilities at the southern border,” a senior administration official told the Daily Caller. “President Trump has made it clear that he’s going to secure America’s border at all cost and this rule plays a vital role in the strategy to restore the integrity to our immigration system and our national security.”
The administration also plans to establish national standards for family detention housing.
DHS first unveiled a plan to terminate Flores last September via a rule change in the federal register, but later asked Congress to modify the agreement on its behalf.
The agreement has been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration since last summer, when DHS attempted to get around the Flores settlement by separating families at the border. The adults in a family unit could then be detained while awaiting court hearings, while the children were held elsewhere. However, the administration ended that practice after severe backlash.
The Trump administration has thus considered the settlement to be a “loophole” that allows illegal immigrants to take advantage of the immigration system. The number of family units crossing the southern border has skyrocketed in the past year, which immigration officials believe is at least partly due to the expectation that migrant adults who arrive with children will quickly be released into the U.S. In February, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced that they detained 290% more family units this fiscal year than they had in the same time frame the previous year.