Peter Schey, an aggressive defender of the human rights of migrants crossing the Southern border, died in Los Angeles on April 2 at age 77 from complications of lymphoma, reports The New York Times.
Schey ran his legal practice as a small nonprofit group in Los Angeles that took on both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington. He led the legal team that negotiated the seminal Flores Settlement Agreement, the case transformed the U.S. immigration policy of the past half-century by protecting unaccompanied migrant children. He also argued and won the case throwing out California’s Proposition 187, a measure that would have denied undocumented migrants social services and kept 270,000 children out of public school.
“Treating children humanely and not detaining them indefinitely in often intolerable conditions is not a legal loophole,” Mr. Schey told The New York Times in 2018. “It is the way civilized nations treat innocent children.” When Trump tried to tear up the Flores agreement, Schey fought back, and in 2020, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration could not hold families indefinitely. Schey’s subsequent case against Proposition 187 led to a federal court declaring the law unconstitutional.