WWhen Donald Trump becomes president again on January 20, he will be legally barred from reviving one of the most controversial policies of his first term. Lawyers representing families separated at the border won an eight-year ban on the practice and are prepared to enforce it if Trump tries to reinstate the policy.

The unusual restriction was part of a settlement approved last year by a U.S. district court between the Biden administration and families whose children were taken by border agents. Hundreds of children have still not been reunited with their parents. Trump – and any president who takes office in the next seven years – is prohibited from returning to his policy of separating parents from their children during deportation proceedings.

The length of the ban was designed in part out of fear that Trump could return to power, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. Trump does not rule out re-separating families at the border. When asked about it in November 2023 during an interview with Univision, he defended the policy, saying it had deterred immigrant families from crossing the border illegally. “It’s stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands because when they hear ‘family separation,’ they say, ‘Well, we’d better not go.’ And they didn’t go,” he said. Tom Homan, who pushed for the policy while running Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is Trump’s choice for “border czar,” told CBS’ 60 Minutes last month News that a return to family separations “must be considered, absolutely.”

Nearly 5,000 children were separated from their families by Trump officials in 2017 and 2018 under a policy called “zero tolerance” that aimed to speed up the process of deporting adult migrants and send a tough signal to other families considering crossing the border into the United States without authorization. . The practice was widely condemned, and in June 2018, Trump signed an executive order ending it.

The human toll of this effort has been considerable. The Trump administration failed to keep records during the chaotic separations, and as many as 1,000 families remain separated, according to Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has represented the separated families in court.

Gelernt says he and a team of lawyers across the country are prepared to defend the ban on family separations if Trump tries to return to the practice. “I hope the Trump administration has recognized the American public’s outpouring and global revulsion at the idea of ​​ripping little children away from their parents and will no longer try to separate families,” said Freeze. “But if it does, we will be back in court immediately.”

The settlement reached in the case of Ms. L vs. ICEcovers thousands of families and prohibits any administration from enacting another family separation policy before 2031, a period that extends beyond Trump’s second term. It also allows parents who have been deported under this policy to temporarily return to the United States, reunite with their children, and seek asylum to remain in the United States. It was approved by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.

The ACLU is concerned that Trump may attempt to circumvent the regulation in less visible ways by slowing down the asylum process for separated families covered by the regulation, or finding other ways to slow down conditions. But if Gelernt sees signs that the Trump administration isn’t honoring the deal, he plans to ask the federal judge overseeing the case to intervene.

Trump could explore other ways to try to escape a ban accepted by his predecessor. The Trump Justice Department could go back to court and directly challenge the ban and ask that the entire regulation be overturned. Gelernt predicted that it would be “a losing battle” and that the courts would respect the conditions.

Gelernt is part of a small army of civil rights lawyers preparing to take action if they believe Trump’s immigration efforts go too far. Over the past year, Trump has pledged to mount a massive expulsion effort and said he could declare a national emergency at the border and use the military to enforce borders to help him achieve this objective.

“We have no choice but to prepare for almost anything at this point,” says Gelernt.