By Gonzalez Olivieri, on Immigration Updates
The Flores settlement agreement, originating from a 1985 lawsuit filed on behalf of Jenny Lisette Flores, a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl detained in squalid conditions in California, has long served as a critical legal safeguard ensuring that immigrant children in federal custody receive basic standards of care and are not held for more than 20 days. The second Trump administration has moved to terminate the agreement entirely, arguing it incentivizes border crossings and that the Department of Homeland Security has already met its terms—claims a federal court rejected, though the government has since appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the number of children detained by ICE has surged to roughly 170 per day, compared to about 25 per day during the final stretch of the Biden administration. Approximately 1,300 children are being held beyond the 20-days limit as of December 2025.
Columbia Law professor Elora Mukherjee, who has represented detained children and testified before Congress about detention conditions, warns that dismantling Flores would leave children with virtually no legal protections, exposing them to prolonged detention lasting months or years in increasingly inhumane conditions. Reports from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas describe worm-infested food, contaminated water, inadequate medical care, and only one hour of schooling per day. Mukherjee also emphasizes that alternatives to detention (such as family case management programs) have demonstrated compliance rates of 99 to 100%, making the continued detention of asylum-seeking children both unnecessary and, at greater cost to taxpayers, unjustifiable.
For more information on this, and other immigration matters, contact the attorneys at Gonzalez Olivieri LLC today.
Reference:
Jeremy Loudenback, Worms, Bugs and Mold: Conditions for Detained Immigrant Children Worsen Under Trump, The Imprint (Feb. 25, 2026), https://imprintnews.org/immigration/worms-bugs-and-mold-conditions-for-detained-immigrant-children-worsen-under-trump.
