Philip G. Schrag has written more than a dozen books over his years as a lawyer and director of the asylum law clinic at Georgetown University. But his latest, Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America, was the most difficult for him to revise. Schrag struggled to stay up to date as the Trump administration changed its immigration policies on a near-daily basis. “I was writing and rewriting up to the last minute,” he told the Observer.
The result is a comprehensive dissection of more than 30 years of legal disputes around the detention of migrant children in the United States. It’s also a timely look at the recent perversion of the entire asylum system, decades after Jenny Lisette Flores—a 15-year-old from El Salvador—found herself at the center of the 1997 Flores agreement, a landmark lawsuit which set minimum standards for how long kids can be locked up and under what conditions. Schrag spoke with the Observer about the policy’s uncertain future under the Trump administration and how the issue of detaining families remains largely unresolved today.
