The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia has filed a class-action lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s administration’s policy of detaining immigrant children without bond hearings, stating the practice violates decades of federal law intended to protect vulnerable youth.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the Eastern District of Virginia, names four plaintiffs who came to the U.S. after being abused, neglected or abandoned by their parents. All have obtained or applied for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, a legal designation Congress created nearly 40 years ago to provide a pathway to citizenship for children who cannot safely return to their home countries.
“These children have every right to pursue SIJS,” said Sophia Gregg, ACLU senior immigrants’ rights attorney. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “recategorizing and reconsidering the entire federal regulations … and their justification really doesn’t hold any water.”
The four plaintiffs are currently being held at the Farmville and Caroline detention facilities in Virginia. According to the ACLU, their detention is part of a broader Trump administration strategy to classify immigrant youth with SIJS as “arriving noncitizens,” subject to mandatory detention and ineligible for bond hearings.
“We’re seeing this across the country for all individuals. Millions of people, potentially, are in immigration detention who would otherwise not have been a few months ago,” Gregg told WTOP. “Those unaccompanied minors are protected under the many federal laws and anti-trafficking laws that are specifically intended to protect children.”
Under the SIJS process, immigrant children must first be released to a sponsor, placed under custody orders from a state judge, and then they can apply for status. Visa availability can take years, but the protections Congress established were designed to prevent children from being detained while they wait.
Instead, the ACLU lawsuit argues, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is keeping children locked up and cutting them off from the ability to pursue their cases and effectively pressuring them to abandon their rights.
Gregg called the policy part of “a mass deportation agenda,” adding these are kids “Congress intended to protect … and identified as being the most vulnerable and in need of protection.”
“The immigration courts are now taking the position, as is the rest of the Trump administration, that nobody, including this specifically vulnerable group, is entitled to hearings for the release under bond pending their immigration cases,” Gregg said.
The case, Sarmiento v. Crawford, was filed with co-counsel Tanishka Cruz of Cruz Law, and Patrice Kopistansky. The ACLU is seeking the immediate release of the named plaintiffs, as well as a ruling that would guarantee bond hearings for similarly situated minors nationwide.
Violation of the Hatch Act
On Friday, the watchdog group Public Citizen filed 11 complaints against major agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of the Treasury, Department of Justice, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration and the White House.
The complaints accuse the federal agencies of tampering with webpages and automatic out-of-office emails to blame Democrats for the government shutdown.
As of Friday afternoon, HUD’s website featured a banner and a pop-up message blaming the “Radical Left” for the current federal government shutdown.
Ethics experts argue the edits violate the Hatch Act, which bars political activity in federal workplaces and protects employees from partisan pressure. They warn the coordinated changes not only misrepresent federal workers but also use government resources to sway voters.
“This is unique. … These agencies are the biggest agencies in the federal government. You’ve got a coordinated effort coming from the White House to get the entire federal government and all the different agencies working together to try to influence the electoral mood of the American public to support Donald Trump and oppose Democrats. I’ve never seen this type of scope of violation of the Hatch Act before in my life,” government affairs lobbyist Craig Holman said.
Holman, who filed the complaints with Public Citizen, added, “This ought to be enough to actually make the Office of Special Counsel do something, or if they don’t do something, it gives me grounds for litigation.”
WTOP’s Michelle Murillo contributed to this report.
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