As a growing number of migrant children are arrested at the Mexico-U.S. border, the Trump administration is arguing that they don’t necessarily need toothbrushes and soap while locked up.
A Justice Department lawyer said at a hearing on Tuesday that toothbrushes and soap were not spelled out as requirements for sanitary conditions in facilities housing children who cross the border illegally, according to a 1997 agreement, the Associated Press reported.
Sarah Fabian, senior litigation counsel for the Department of Justice, told a three-judge panel at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that the 1997 Flores agreement doesn’t list items that must be provided in border facilities.
The agreement implemented certain standards for the detention, treatment, and release of minor immigrants.
In July 2017, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee found the Trump administration had broken the Flores agreement by not providing migrant children with appropriate food or hygienic supplies, housing them in cold facilities without beds.
Young immigrants caught on the border said they had to sleep in cold, overcrowded cells and were given inadequate food and dirty water, AP reported. The government appealed.
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According to the Flores agreement, detained children must be provided with food, water, emergency medical care and toilets, and cannot be held for more than 20 days.
One of the judges asked under what circumstances a person didn’t need a toothbrush and soap for days. Possibly for shorter-term stays, Fabian replied. Because the Flores agreement did not specifically list items such as soap or toothbrushes, Fabian said the government had fulfilled the Flores agreement.
Circuit Judge William Fletcher asked, “Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than … cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?”
He added that it was “inconceivable” that the government would describe those conditions as “safe and sanitary”, BBC reported.
Democratic congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently called U.S.-Mexico border migrant detention centers “concentration camps.”
“The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it,” she posted on Instagram Monday.
