Trump administration hit with lawsuits over inhumane treatment of migrant detainees

The Trump administration is increasingly being challenged on its hardline immigration stance by lawsuits alleging inhumane and illegal treatment of migrants held in detention facilities.

Among the latest suits was one filed in a California district court on Monday by the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law on behalf of more than 200 detainees.

The claimants, mostly immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, repeatedly alleged that detention conditions have included unsanitary drinking water, spoiled food and inadequate opportunities to bathe.

One mother of children aged two and nine, said she “begged for water” for her daughter but was refused. “My daughter started crying. The officers told me to shut up,” according to the suit.

Another woman, Iris, was one of several who described receiving “frozen” food that “smelled bad” and was “not fit for consumption”.

Meanwhile, across the country in Connecticut, a judge has ruled in a suit on behalf of two children separated from their parents at the southern border, that the government is responsible for addressing post traumatic stress disorder brought on by the ordeal.

A hearing is expected later on Wednesday in the suit originally brought by lawyers for Connecticut Legal Services and Yale Law School.

“They’re beginning the long process of recovery from the deep trauma that the Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy has inflicted upon them,” Yale Law School professor Muneer Ahmad said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Nearly 3,000 children have been separated at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s now partially abandoned “zero-tolerance” family separation policy. The government is currently in the process of reuniting many of those children with parents in compliance with a federal court order issued in California in June.

Other suits have alleged similarly horrid treatment as that in the latest case out of California. A more than 1,000 page filing by 17 states and Washington DC against the Trump administration described one child being returned “full of dirt and lice”, one mother claimed. “It seems like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us.”

Another suit alleges that staff working on the behalf of the Office of Refugee Resettlement are routinely drugging detained child migrants with psychotropics, and by force if necessary.

“Sometimes they give me forced injections,” one child alleged in court filings. “One or two staff hold my arms, and the nurse gives me an injection.”

Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the Department of Justice – the two agencies primarily named in the suits – could be immediately reached for comment.

All the suits directly or indirectly point at the 1997 Flores settlement which dictates the length of time and conditions under which children may be held in immigration detention, and which the administration has unsuccessfully tried to skirt. Under Flores, the government must “hold minors in facilities that are safe and sanitary and that are consistent with the [government’s] concern for the particular vulnerability of minors”.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.