The Firm has partnered with immigrants’ rights groups representing unaccompanied migrant children to sue the Trump Administration for violating the fundamental statutory and constitutional rights of their child clients. The organizational plaintiffs are the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef, based in California) and the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES, based in Texas). Represented by litigators from ImmDef, Justice Action Center (JAC) and Simpson Thacher, the plaintiffs filed ImmDef v. DHS in the United States District Court in the Central District of California, on January 14, 2021.
This lawsuit demands the reinstatement of a fair asylum process for unaccompanied minors. Over the past two years, the Trump Administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) program, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” has sent more than 69,000 asylum seekers, including many babies and children, to some of the most dangerous places in Mexico. Out of desperation, and often due to circumstances beyond their control, some children cross the border alone, in hopes that they will be safer in U.S. custody. Once these unaccompanied children are in the U.S., the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) is supposed to protect them by creating a system that enables them to seek asylum in the U.S. and be given an immigration hearing before they are removed, and by setting out child-specific protections to take into account the special needs of children who are alone. However, the federal government has been denying and violating the protections afforded by TVPRA to these unaccompanied children, if they have ever had any, even brief, interaction with any part of MPP. At least 500 unaccompanied children who have been detained in government facilities and previously interacted with MPP are at risk of being deported by the Department of Homeland Security without getting a non-adversarial asylum hearing from a child-centered lens.
The case has been covered by publications including CBS.
The Simpson Thacher team includes Stephen Blake, Brooke Cucinella, Buzz Frahn, Raul Duran, Charles Hoff, Rachel June-Graber, Nicholas Orr, Ryan Snyder, Regina Wang and Sarah Brim.