On October 3, 2019, immigrant children and their parents filed this class action in the U.S. District Court for Arizona. The plaintiffs sued various personnel from five federal departments: the Department of Justice (DOJ), including Jeff Sessions; the White House, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including John Kelly; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The plaintiffs sued under §§ 1985 and 1986 and Bivens, claiming violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The plaintiffs alleged that defendants’ policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. border caused irreparable and psychological and physical damage to children and parents. They claimed that this practice was intended to inflict pain on immigrants in hopes they would abandon their asylum cases and to deter other immigrants from seeking asylum. After children were separated, they were detained in punitive conditions, and the defendants failed to adequately track children so as to reunite children with their parents. The plaintiffs sought compensatory and punitive damages. They also sought certification of two classes: (1) a class of all minor children who had arrived since 2017 and been separated from their parents by DHS or its agencies without a hearing demonstrating that a parent was unfit or dangerous to the child, and (2) a class of all parents of minor children subjected to the same separation with a hearing. The case was assigned to Judge James A. Soto.

As of October 23, 2019, the case was ongoing.

Cedar Hobbs - 11/03/2019


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