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A decades-old court settlement that sets standards for the conditions of detention and requires prompt placement in the least restrictive setting appropriate to the child’s age and needs
’s administrations detained large numbers of migrant families and expanded family-detention capacity beginning in 2014, resulting in mothers and children being held together in institutional facilitie...
and together create a patchwork of protections intended to limit how children are held when detained with parents and to prioritize family unity and sanitary, least-restrictive settings, but implement...
Yes — during the administration immigrant children were held in custody in facilities that included chain‑link enclosures, crowded tents and converted shelters commonly characterized in reporting as “...
’s official policy is that it does not detain unaccompanied children and that hotels should not be used as detention sites, but reporting and litigation show that families and children have in some ca...
The sources provided do not contain a clean, official year-by-year table of how many children were held in custody or in family detention for each year 2016–2025; ICE publishes bi‑monthly detention st...
since mid‑2025 requires to account for parental interests when arresting or detaining parents—allowing detained parents to identify caretakers, seeking to keep families together where practicable, and...
create a framework of special protections for children encountered in immigration enforcement, but those protections are contested in practice: the Flores settlement and subsequent judicial oversight ...
The Obama administration governed immigrant child detention primarily through a policy mix that expanded family detention capacity, relied on existing legal settlements that limited how long unaccompa...
A cluster of court decisions, a decades-old consent decree known as , and a flurry of litigation in response to ’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy were the legal fulcrums that shaped in the 2010s; courts...
in Family Residential Centers (FRCs) facing pending asylum claims have several legal avenues to seek release or better conditions: individualized custody review including bond hearings or parole reque...
’s April 2018 “” policy shifted enforcement tactics by mandating criminal prosecution of all misdemeanor illegal entry cases, which in practice funneled parents into the criminal system and led to wid...
over the past decade have repeatedly scrutinized ’s interactions with minors — from class-action wins that curbed juvenile detention practices to emergency habeas releases and injunctions addressing d...
The principal legal framework governing what happens to children when arrests a parent is (Directive 11064.4), issued in July 2025, which sets internal agency protocols intended to protect parental ri...
Minors found by police may end up under two very different federal regimes: custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that makes detention and removal decisions, or c...
The Obama Administration’s family reunification process for unaccompanied children centered on transferring custody from DHS to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlem...
The Obama administration inherited and debated a range of non‑custodial tools — broadly called alternatives to detention (ATDs) including community‑based case management, monitoring technologies, lega...
Between 2009 and 2016, a mix of court decisions and state and local policies constrained some tactical tools ICE used while leaving its overall removal capacity intact: federal court settlements and y...
The legal landscape governing children who end up in custody alongside or after the detention of a parent is a patchwork of federal statutes, a decades-old court settlement, interagency transfer rules...
A precise year-by-year table of how many children housed each fiscal year from 2009 through 2024 and a full set of cannot be reconstructed from the documents provided here because ORR’s public pages a...
Federal immigration-enforcement policy requires officers to consider parental interests when detaining parents or guardians, encouraging—when practicable—that parents be allowed to arrange alternative...