President Donald Trump is again trying to terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 legal decree that mandates basic standards of care and oversight for children (17 years old and younger) in U.S. immigration custody.
Basic standards include adequate meals, clean water, clothing, and medical assistance, among other considerations. The agreement also requires children to be held in detention facilities and released expeditiously.
(Advocates fighting against Trump’s attempt to abolish Flores report that “In March and April, CPB reported that it had 213 children in custody for more than 72 hours. That number included 14 children, including toddlers, who were held for over 20 days in April.”)
The Flores agreement, established in 1997, governs the conditions for all immigrant children in U.S. custody. https://t.co/rDCUKyYKH2
— WUSA9 (@wusa9) August 9, 2025
Trump tried and failed to terminate the agreement in 2019, too. The same judge who blocked the Trump administration in 2019, Judge Dolly Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California, blocked the recent attempt on Friday. Gee determined then, as she does now, that it’s up to Congress, not the White House, to dissolve or replace such an agreement.
Note: Below is President Trump at a press conference in 2019 talking about the Flores Agreement. He said: “Judge Flores, whoever you may be, that decision is a disaster for our country.”
As seen in the video, MSNBC Ari Melber noted that the agreement is not named after the judge but after a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl, Jenny Flores, who was detained in a U.S. detention facility for months without basic standards and was subject to a strip-search.
Trump has railed against the Flores Agreement saying "Judge Flores, […] that decision is a disaster."
— The Beat with Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) August 22, 2019
Though the Flores Agreement is a powerful ruling, setting standards for migrant detention, it's named after Jenny Flores – a young girl who fled El Salvador in the 1980s. pic.twitter.com/MHM0TulcIv
While the White House boasted on August 1 that “July was another month of record low illegal crossings at the southern border, with just 4,598 illegal immigrants arrested by Border Patrol — a 24% drop from the previous record low set in June and an average of just 148 illegal crossings every day,” the government’s motion to end the Flores Agreement claims the decree “had fueled unlawful border crossings by families and had hampered the government’s ability to effectively detain and deport families.”
The Trump administration argues that the agreement incentivizes migrant families to enter the United States illegally.
Judge Gee wrote in her recent decision, that government lawyers “incredulously” tried to argue that the “expeditious release” from detention under Flores was intended to apply only to children who enter alone and not to those who enter the country with their families. Gee wrote: “This is plainly incorrect.”
Note: The New York Times reports that “the Trump administration is expected to appeal the ruling again, setting the stage for the case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.”
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