WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is ending settlement talks that could have led to payments totaling $1 billion to families separated in 2018 under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy.
The government will instead begin taking individual cases to trial, litigating lawsuits filed on behalf of hundreds of families seeking monetary damages for the psychological trauma they say the separations caused, according to
Lee Gelernt,
deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrant-rights project and a negotiator in the talks. The organization had been prepared to continue negotiations when the federal government called them off, he said.
“While the parties have been unable to reach a global settlement agreement at this time, we remain committed to engaging with the plaintiffs and to bringing justice to the victims of this abhorrent policy,” Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson said.
As part of the Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance enforcement policy, immigration agents separated thousands of children, ranging from infants to teenagers, from their parents at the southern border in 2018 after they had crossed illegally from Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. In some cases families were forcefully broken up with no provisions to track and later reunite them, government investigations found.
The Wall Street Journal in October reported that the government and lawyers for the families had been in talks to pay up to $450,000 in damages to each person affected by those Trump administration actions. The lawsuits allege some of the affected children suffered from a range of ailments, including heat exhaustion and malnutrition, and were kept in cold rooms and provided little medical attention.
Amid political outcry from Republican lawmakers, after the settlement talks were reported, the government told outside negotiators the number would need to be lowered. This week, the lawyers say, the Justice Department pulled out of negotiations entirely.
“We are hardly naive that politics sometimes plays a role in DOJ decisions but it is shameful that it happened when the lives of little children are at stake,” Mr. Gelernt said. “History will not look kindly on the Biden administration’s decision not to stand up for these small children.”
In early November, GOP lawmakers wrote to Mr. Biden urging him to not follow through with the settlement talks. “[R]ewarding illegal immigration with financial payments runs counter to our laws and would only serve to encourage more lawlessness at our border,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and 10 other Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote.
The payments were likely to become an attack line in the 2022 midterms, with Republicans looking to make Mr. Biden’s record on immigration a central issue in the election. Mr. Biden has said the separated families deserved to be compensated and he was comfortable with payouts.
A universal settlement of the claims could have led to a total potential payout of $1 billion or more, people familiar with the matter said, but government officials said litigating individual trials could be even costlier. Around 940 families have filed claims so far, asking for an average of $3.4 million per family.
Litigating the claims individually will put the Biden administration in the uncomfortable position of fighting the immigrant families, a spectacle the government had hoped to avoid through a universal settlement, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking.
President Biden made the family-separations policy a major issue in the 2020 campaign, calling it a “moral and national shame.” The Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Biden set up a family reunifications task force, and has so far reunited about 50 families.
The Justice Department’s decision doesn’t impact separate settlement negotiations in a different class-action suit filed by the ACLU over the 2018 practice of family separations at the southern border. Those negotiations concern mental health and other care for the families, along with potentially granting them permanent immigration status in the U.S.
—Aruna Viswanatha contributed to this article.
Write to Michelle Hackman at [email protected]
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
