Peter Schey may block illegal immigrant parents’ deportations until they’re reunited with children

The chief lawyer representing illegal immigrant children in the U.S. said Wednesday he is considering asking a court to block the deportations of any parents involved in the family separations until they can be reunited with their children.

Peter Schey said he is studying the option, and may ask a federal judge in California to impose the condition as part of the Flores Settlement, the long-standing agreement that governs how the government can treat illegal immigrant children — and by extension their parents.

“We are currently exploring whether the court in the Flores case may have the authority to block the deportation of parents until they have been reunited with their parents. We are also exploring whether the court may order the Trump administration to immediately implement a procedure to reunite children with parents who have already been deported,” Mr. Schey said in a statement he provided to The Washington Times.

Homeland Security officials said that from May 5 through June 9 some 2,342 juveniles were separated from parents who were jailed as part of the new zero tolerance policy.

The government cannot say how many of them have been reunited with their parents yet.

And lawyers say some parents were deported without their children, who were “lost” in the child detention system run by the federal Health Department.

The Flores settlement, reached in 1997 and updated in 2015, set standards for children who came to the border without their parents — Unaccompanied Alien Children, or UAC, in government-speak. But in 2015 Judge Dolly M. Gee, an Obama appointee who sits in the Central District of California, ruled that even children who came to the border with parents should be protected.

That means the children must be quickly released from custody — Judge Gee said in the case of those who came as families, within about 20 days. And since the children are generally to be released to parents, it means the government has to free them, too, so that it can release the children to them.

President Trump on Wednesday asked Congress to overturn the Flores ruling, and also ordered Attorney General Jeff Sessions to ask Judge Gee for an update that would allow families to be held in detention together.

Mr. Schey said Mr. Trump’s attack on the ruling was “factually and legally false and dishonest.”

He said even under Flores children can be detained with their parents as long as the conditions are humane and the child isn’t in a jail-like secure setting.