Judge Appoints Watchdogs Over Migrant Child Detention as Trump Fights to End the Rules That Require Them

U.S. District Chief Judge Dolly M. Gee appointed a special master and an independent monitor this week to enforce a nearly 30-year-old legal agreement governing how the federal government treats migrant children in custody, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Gee named attorney Andrea Sheridan Ordin as special master and Dr. Paul H. Wise as independent monitor, over the objections of Trump administration lawyers, the Los Angeles Times reported. The move enforces the Flores settlement, a 1997 consent decree setting minimum standards for housing, food, medical care and time limits on detaining migrant kids.

The New York Times reported, as summarized by KFF Health News, that Gee found officials at detention centers in Texas and California had likely housed children and other detainees at unsafe temperatures and denied them soap and adequate sleeping conditions. Gee wrote that the government could not "claim amnesia as to the history of the case," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Advocates have spent the past year collecting declarations from detainees describing inedible food, poor medical care and harsh treatment, the Los Angeles Times reported. Multiple parents described an ICE agent dressed as Santa Claus at a Christmas event who shoved away children trying to hug him, then disappeared with candy once cameras were gone. Others said children with serious medical issues were given only Tylenol. Gee called the evidence on medical care "conflicting" with "stark" differences between official accounts and reality, and rejected the government's demand that someone else pay for the new oversight, calling that request "absurd."

Gee appointed a special master during Trump's first term after the family separation policy sparked national outrage. That monitorship ended last summer, just as the administration ramped up its current mass deportation push.

Fighting the Settlement in Court

While Gee enforces Flores, the Trump administration has been trying to kill it. It has pushed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to issue a straightforward up-or-down ruling on whether the settlement should stand at all, the Los Angeles Times reported. The appellate panel voiced serious doubts about scrapping the consent decree during oral arguments in June, and legal experts told the Los Angeles Times the administration would likely appeal any unfavorable ruling to the Supreme Court.

That fight is playing out alongside a broader legal battle over immigrant detention generally. The Daily Signal reported that the 9th Circuit ruled 2-1 against the administration's policy of detaining illegal immigrants without bond hearings, with Trump-appointed Judge Daniel Bress writing for the majority that the policy marks a sharp break from three decades of practice. That makes five federal appeals circuits that have ruled against the administration on that question, versus two that have sided with it, setting up likely Supreme Court review, according to the Daily Signal.

A Separate Effort on Missing Children

The administration says it is trying to find nearly 480,000 unaccompanied migrant children who arrived during the Biden administration, many of whom vanished from the government's tracking. The Daily Wire reported that Homeland Security Investigations will open an investigation "within hours" once a child reports abuse through a new hotline campaign, and that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Monday that authorities have located more than 148,000 of them.

The scale of the problem traces to an August 2024 inspector general's report cited by the Daily Wire. Roughly 291,000 migrant children were never given future court dates, making them nearly impossible to track, and another 32,000 were given hearing dates but never showed up. The Biden-era hotline for at-risk minors had 65,000 unanswered calls, according to John Fabbricatore, a senior HHS advisor quoted by the Daily Wire.

DHS General Counsel James Percival, in comments to Fox News, argued that a small number of federal judges are engaging in "naked political activism" against the administration's immigration enforcement, singling out Boston-based Judge Brian Murphy over a blocked deportation flight to South Sudan that involved migrants Percival said had committed serious crimes. Critics have said Percival's public campaign against named judges improperly targets the judiciary, according to Fox News's own reporting on the criticism.

Breitbart, meanwhile, framed the deportation surge in economic terms, reporting that immigration courts ordered 79,000 removals in June, up from about 25,000 in December 2024, and citing Center for Immigration Studies analyst Andrew Arthur's line that judges are "plowing through these cases like a freaking snowplow in Utah snow." Breitbart also cited reporting from the Boston Globe and Washington Post that elder-care employers are raising wages and sign-on bonuses as Haitian workers with expiring Temporary Protected Status leave the workforce.

The underlying legal question Gee, the 9th Circuit, and eventually the Supreme Court will have to settle is whether a 1997 consent decree limiting how the government can detain migrant children still applies to an administration explicitly trying to end it. Ordin and Wise are now on the ground enforcing Flores while that fight continues, and the Trump administration has already objected to their appointment.