Baby Jails

"I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were."

For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government's practice of jailing children and families for months or even years until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown University's asylum law clinic, takes readers through thirty years of conflict as refugee advocates resisted the detention of migrant children. The saga begins during the Reagan administration with 15-year-old Jenny Lisette Flores, who languished in a Los Angeles motel that the government had turned into a makeshift jail by draining the swimming pool, barring the windows, and surrounding the building with barbed wire. What became the Flores lawsuit was still alive thirty years later, with the Trump administration resorting to the forced separation families when the courts would not allow the long-term jailing of the children..Schrag provides recommendations to reform a system that has caused anguish and trauma for thousands of parents and children. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the continuing struggle between the government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who seek safety in America.