On Monday evening, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles denied the Trump administration's request to modify a 1997 consent decree to allow migrant families to be detained together for long periods and in unlicensed facilities. The Justice Department's request for changes in the Flores agreement, she wrote, was "a cynical attempt" to shift immigration policymaking to the courts after "over 20 years of congressional inaction and ill-considered executive action that have led to the current stalemate." Gee had rejected a similar request to modify the Flores agreement by former President Barack Obama's administration in 2015, and she said Monday that President Trump's Justice Department had failed to offer new evidence that a revision was necessary.
The Justice Department said it is reviewing Gee's ruling. Another federal judge has ordered Trump to stop separating families at the border and reunite separated migrant families starting Tuesday, giving Trump few options. Under Trump's "zero tolerance" policy, most people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without permission were jailed, with children sent to separate facilities than their parents, often hundreds or thousands of miles away. When Obama faced a similar influx of migrants from Central America in 2014, he eventually settled on releasing most families together, often on bond or with ankle monitors to assure they returned to court. "Sifting through the government's false narrative, the court clearly found that the Flores settlement has never resulted in the separation of families," said Peter Schey, a lead counsel on the original Flores lawsuit. "President Trump needs to take responsibility for his own misguided policies." Peter Weber
2020 Democrats should take these political pros' advice with a grain of salt.
After all, Danny Diaz, Beth Hansen, Jeff Roe, and Terry Sullivan's candidates — Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), respectively — didn't do so well in the 2016 presidential elections. Still, they met up with Politico to share how Wednesday and Thursday nights' debaters can avoid a similar fate.
To start, Politico asked the former campaigners how they felt when their candidates went into the first 2016 debates. That quickly pivoted into their expectations for the Democratic debates, where Roe of Cruz's campaign said a candidate would "be smart" to "have a moment against [Joe] Biden." "If they want to bring him all the way down, they ought to," Roe continued, saying that wasn't Cruz's strategy in the first debate, and that could be why the senator almost didn't make the second.
When it came to discussing which Democrat would be facing the most pressure in the first debates, the Republican campaigners were generally in agreement. Sullivan, of Rubio's campaign, said it was Pete Buttigieg and Beto O'Rourke because "those two are the most a creation of the media" and "if they can't meet expectations, it's the end of them." Biden, meanwhile, could "crap the bed" and still make future debates, Sullivan continued.
Hansen, who ran Kasich's campaign, suggested Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) would see the most pressure because she's one of the "people who voters don't know a lot about." And Diaz, of Bush's campaign, similarly thinks it's "the people who are worried about making it through the summer and being on the stage in the fall."
Find all the GOP campaign runners' advice at Politico. Kathryn Krawczyk