The Trump administration is making a renewed push to end the Flores Settlement Agreement—a decades-old policy that officials say is one of the biggest magnets for illegal immigration and a serious obstacle to enforcing border security.
In a court filing on Thursday, the Department of Justice, along with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to terminate the consent decree that has dictated how migrant children are detained and released since 1997, The Washington Examiner reported.
According to the filing, the Flores agreement is outdated, unworkable, and has effectively frozen U.S. immigration policy in place, leaving the government with two bad options: either release migrant families across the board or separate parents from their children. The administration argues that continuing under this framework makes it nearly impossible to secure the border or deter illegal crossings.
The legal challenge signals a clear effort to shift how the U.S. handles family units at the border—an issue that remains at the center of the national immigration debate.
“For years, the Flores consent decree has been a tool of the Left to promote an open borders agenda,” a DHS official said to The Examiner. “It is long overdue for a single district in California to stop managing the Executive Branch’s immigration functions. The Trump administration is committed to restoring common sense to our immigration system.”
After the filing, The Associated Press and other media organizations said it was a plan to “end protections for immigrant children in federal custody.”
But The Examiner said that ending the Flores Agreement would actually result in fewer family separations.
The push to end the Flores Settlement Agreement is headed to court on July 18, where U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee, who’s long overseen the case, will consider the motion. Gee has previously blocked the Trump administration from detaining migrant families longer than 20 days and from bypassing the restrictions that prevent separating children from their parents in custody.
This marks President Trump’s strongest move yet to dismantle Flores, a settlement he also tried to terminate near the end of his first term, only to be blocked by the courts in 2019. But this time, with new regulations in place and a judiciary reshaped by Trump’s first-term appointments, administration officials believe the odds are finally in their favor.
In a 67-page court filing, the administration argues that major legal and policy shifts, including the Homeland Security Act and the rollout of federal care standards for migrant children, have made the Flores agreement both outdated and unconstitutional.
The Justice Department also claims the courts have stretched the original intent of the settlement far beyond its scope. What was meant to apply only to unaccompanied minors, they argue, has been improperly expanded to cover family units—a class of migrants that’s declined sharply since Trump returned to office.
“This class has included millions of people over the years. The FSA—originally designed to address a very specific set of narrow circumstances—has been interpreted to address the custody of all minors at all stages,” the government said in its filing.
Justice Department officials say the legal playing field has changed significantly in recent years. They point to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez as a major turning point, arguing that it undermines the court’s authority to enforce Flores as it currently stands. That ruling has become a central pillar in the administration’s legal push to dismantle the decades-old agreement.
“After 40 years of litigation and 28 years of judicial control over a critical element of U.S. immigration policy … it is time for this case to end,” the government said.