The Trump administration says it can detain migrant families as long as prosecution requires

Dozens of women, men and their children, many fleeing poverty and violence in Honduras, Guatamala and El Salvador, arrive at a bus station following release from Customs and Border Protection

(Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

last updated 30 June 2018

The Justice Department said in a district court filing Friday that the Trump administration can detain migrant families intact at the border for as long as it takes to prosecute them.

The claim came in response to a Tuesday court ruling prohibiting family separations and requiring immigrant children currently separated from their parents to be reunited with them within 30 days. Because of the ban, the DOJ argued, the administration can now disregard the 1997 Flores agreement that prohibited the federal detention of children for longer than 20 days.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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