Georgetown University Law Center Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW 2020 The Law Against Family Separation Carrie F. Cordero Georgetown University Law Center,
[email protected] Heidi Li Feldman Georgetown University Law Center,
[email protected] Chimène Keitner University of California Hastings College of the Law,
[email protected] This paper can be downloaded free of charge from: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2234 Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 51, No. 2, 432. This open-access article is brought to you by the Georgetown Law Library. Posted with permission of the author. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub Part of the National Security Law Commons, and the Torts Commons THE LAW AGAINST FAMILY SEPARATION Carrie F. Cordero, Heidi Li Feldman, Chimène I. Keitner* ABSTRACT This Article offers the first comprehensive assessment of how domestic and international law limits the U.S. government’s ability to separate foreign children From the adults accompanying them when they seek to enter the United States. As early as March 6, 2017, then- Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he was considering separating families at the border as a deterrent to illegal immigration as part of a “zero tolerance” policy whereby the Trump administration intended the strictest enforcement of immigration law against those migrants coming to the U.S. southern border. Kelly did not say upon what legal basis the administration could lawfully separate families at the border as a component of its immigration policies. Whatever the merits of maximal prosecution oF adults unlawFully crossing the border, adopting this policy did not convert family separation into a lawful byproduct of the arrest of an adult.