On Wednesday, in the face of rising public outcry, President Trump issued an executive order to stop the separation of immigrant families. The vaguely worded order suggests that the administration’s policy going forward will be to detain families together, which is expected to run afoul of the 1997 Flores settlement agreement that children cannot be held in government detention for more than 20 days. An alternative would be dropping the “zero-tolerance” policy that criminally prosecutes undocumented immigrants for crossing the border. At this point,...
