DETENTION ITSELF VIOLATES AMERICAN VALUES:

The administration and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a joint plan on Monday to settle a class-action lawsuit over the Trump-era separation practice, under which roughly 4,000 migrant children were forcibly separated from their parents near the U.S.-Mexico border. The settlement, which would last for six years, is expected to be approved by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who outlawed the separations in 2018.

"The separation of families at our southern border was a betrayal of our nation's values," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. "By providing services to these families and implementing policies to prevent future separations, today's agreement addresses the impacts of those separations and helps ensure that nothing like this happens again."

If approved, the 46-page settlement agreement would provide separated families a special process to request U.S. asylum and significantly narrow the reasons for government-sanctioned family separations, preventing officials from using the legal argument the Trump administration cited to justify its separation policy. 

U.S. border officials would no longer be allowed to use parents' illegal entry into the country as a basis to separate them from their children. Separations of migrant families would be limited to rare cases, such as those involving abusive parents or those with serious criminal records.

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