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A federal judge has ordered an eight-year ban on a policy of separating migrant families at the border, preemptively prohibiting Donald Trump from re-instituting his so-called zero-tolerance immigration policy should he be elected president again in 2024.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw on Friday approved a settlement between the Justice Department and families represented by the ACLU. The family separation policy, Sabraw said, “represents one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country,” The Associated Press reported.
Under the settlement agreement, which covers 4,000–5,000 families, the government will continue to fund family reunifications in the U.S. and provide families with work, housing and legal assistance, the ACLU said in a press release.
“This settlement is a critical step toward closing one of the darkest chapters of the Trump administration,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, in the release.
In 2018, under immense bipartisan pressure, then-President Trump ended his administration’s zero tolerance policy via executive order. Sabraw’s eight-year ban on any similar such policy would effectively prevent the former president from reviving it; Trump has refused to rule out restarting the policy if elected.
As the GOP primary front-runner, the former president has significantly ramped up his anti-immigration rhetoric in recent months, raising alarm among democracy advocates that he would wield his executive powers in a similarly reckless, if not more extreme, fashion than he did in his first term.
Trump has vowed to carry out mass detentions and deportations, to end birthright citizenship for children whose parents are undocumented, to reinstitute his widely criticized “Muslim ban,” and to bar entry to people deemed anti-Israel. He has stepped up racist, xenophobic attacks on undocumented immigrants as well, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In an interview with Univision in November, Trump defended separating migrant families during his first term. “When you hear that you’re going to be separated from your family, you don’t come,” he said.
At least one study suggests that Trump is wrong about that.