The Reality of Current US Immigration Policy 41 provide alternative routes to safety for children fleeing gang warfare and drug murders in the countries of the Northern Triangle,27 the withdrawal of temporary protected status in the United States for law-abiding and self-supporting survivors of calamities in Honduras, El Salvador, and Haiti.28 A central plank of the Trump administration’s immigration control agenda moving forward is large-scale and prolonged child migrant imprisonment. The government’s justification for this is twofold: a need to address unmanageable border arrivals and an intention to stop what it considers the perverse incentive, generated by the current child release policy, to transport children on dangerous journeys. Paradoxically, then, the government claims that by preventing children at serious risk of gang violence from accessing safety, it is protecting them from harm. But at the same time, post-pandemic border control policies have done exactly the opposite. They have forced children seeking asylum back across the border with no attention to their needs or vulnerabilities, they have subjected families awaiting processing of their asylum claims to indefinite delays as they await their turn in dangerous Mexican borderlands, and, despite court orders mandating release of child migrants from detention, they continue to hold significant numbers of children in crowded and unsanitary facilities. So far, the Trump administration has been unable to implement child migrant detention on a comprehensive and “deterrent” scale because of Flores, the muchcited Supreme Court settlement that addresses child migration detention.29 Flores became a household name during the family-separation debacle. When Supreme Court cases become household names, it is reasonable to suggest that a watershed US political event has taken place. So it was with Dred Scott, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade. And so it is with Flores. The administration is currently attempting to reverse Flores to clear the way for indefinite detention of migrant children with their families. The Flores case has been on the books for thirty-five years. It started off as a challenge to the indefinite detention of unaccompanied child migrants in harsh facilities where children were commingled with unrelated adults. It has continued as a platform for challenging the circumstances in which migrant children, both nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states-2/; “Raising the Global Travel Security Bar: DHS Announces New Travel Restrictions on Six Countries and Updated Process for Evaluating Foreign Country Compliance,” Department of Homeland Security, January 31, 2020, www.dhs .gov/news/2020/01/31/raising-global-travel-security-bar-dhs-announces-new-travel-restrictions-six. 27 “Status of the Central American Minors Program,” United States State Department, Office of the Spokesperson, November 8, 2017, www.state.gov/status-of-the-central-american-minors-pro gram/. 28 Continuation of Documentation for Beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status Designations for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan, 84 Fed. Reg. 59403 (November 4, 2019), www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/04/2019-24047/continuationof-documentation-for-beneficiaries-of-temporary-protected-status-designations-for-el. 29 Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press