Migrant children who wait in camps along the U.S.-Mexico border for the Border Patrol to process them are in the agency’s custody and are subject to a long-standing court-supervised agreement that sets standards for their treatment, a judge ruled. Wednesday’s ruling means the Department of Homeland Security must quickly process the children and place them in facilities that are “safe and sanitary.” Children traveling alone must be turned over within 72 hours to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, according to the Associated Press.
The issue of when the children are officially in Border Patrol custody is important because of the 1997 court settlement on how migrant children in U.S. government custody must be treated. Those standards include a time limit on how long the children can be held and services such as toilets, sinks, and temperature controls. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee ruled that the Customs and Border Protection’s juvenile coordinator must maintain records on minors held in the agency’s custody for more than 72 hours and that includes any time the minors spend in the camps. The agency must make sure that the treatment of minors at open-air sites complies with the 1997 agreement, Gee wrote. Gee set a May 10 deadline for the juvenile coordinator to file an interim report about the number of minors held in open-air sites and how the agency was complying with the judge’s order. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that they are reviewing the court’s order and that they “will continue to transport vulnerable individuals and children encountered on the border to its facilities as quickly as possible.”