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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Alexandra Villarreal in San Antonio

Thousands of families’ futures in the US could be helped by order to restore legal aid – will Trump comply?

a women speaking to another women
Immigrant services staffers console an Ecuadorian mother (right), after she signed a legal document giving custody of her children to friends in the case that she and her husband are deported on 25 March 2017 in Stamford, Connecticut. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

A US district judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore legal services for potentially thousands of migrant families after officials violated a historic settlement agreement that had forced the federal government to repair some of the devastating impact of the family separation scandal from the first Trump White House that sparked bipartisan uproar at the time.

Judge Dana Sabraw has mandated that the executive branch resume services by an independent contractor advising parents and children who were separated during Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy at the US-Mexico border in 2017 and 2018, when accounts of traumatic scenes spread around the world and a secret recording was made public of terrified, sobbing children being torn from their parents by federal agents, to be detained separately.

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