Flores v. Enforcement: Children’s Rights in Immigration Detention

Sylvia: Across the United States, thousands of immigrant children pass through federal immigration detention each year. According to The Deportation Data Project, as of December 2025, more than 1,300 unaccompanied children and infants last year were held in detention beyond legal time limits. Their motives for migrating vary, from seeking safety and opportunity, to escaping conflict, persecution, human rights abuses, environmental crises, and family separation to name a few.

But once children enter U.S. government custody, their treatment is no longer shaped only by migration policy or border enforcement. It becomes governed by a specific legal framework that determines how long they may be held, under what conditions they are confined, and what protections they are entitled to as minors under federal law.

For decades, that framework has been anchored in a Supreme Court case and a federal settlement that most Americans have never heard of, but that quietly governs the daily reality of children inside detention facilities: Reno v. Flores of 1993 and the Flores Settlement Agreement of 1997.

These legal standards were designed to place limits on how the government detains children and to ensure their prompt release into safe and appropriate settings. They establish rules about conditions of confinement, timelines for release, and the government’s obligations toward minors in federal custody.

Yet, persistent reporting, litigation, and federal oversight over the years suggest that the lived reality inside many detention centers often looks very different from what these protections promise on paper.

In this episode, we’ll examine the gap between legal doctrine and lived enforcement, beginning with the case that set these rules in motion.

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To understand how this legal framework began, we have to go back to 1993 and a Supreme Court case called Reno v. Flores.

The case did not begin as a broad challenge to immigration detention. It was brought as a class action on behalf of immigrant minors challenging federal detention policies governing how unaccompanied children were held and released. It addressed one fundamental question, what can the government do with immigrant minors who arrive in the United States without a parent or legal guardian?

Although the case concerned children who arrived alone, the legal rule it established would later apply to children who were separated from their parents and then legally reclassified as “unaccompanied,” bringing them under the same detention framework.

At the time, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to today’s Department of Homeland Security, had a policy of detaining these children unless they could be released to a parent or legal guardian. Release to other responsible adults, like relatives, family friends, or community sponsors, was generally not permitted. As a result, many children remained in detention for extended periods of time, even when safe alternatives existed.

Advocates challenged this policy, arguing that it violated the children’s due process rights and that the conditions of confinement were inappropriate for minors.

The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the government’s policy. In a 7 to 2 decision, the Court ruled that the INS regulation was constitutional. The majority reasoned that the government has broad authority over immigration matters and that detaining minors in these circumstances did not violate substantive due process. The Court also found that the government’s preference for releasing children only to parents or legal guardians was a reasonable way to ensure their safety.

In other words, the Court did not rule on whether the government was required to use the least restrictive setting for children, nor did it impose detailed standards on conditions of detention. Instead, it upheld the government’s discretion in setting those policies and allowed detention as a default.

The litigation did not end after the Supreme Court’s decision. Instead, it shifted focus. If the Court had confirmed that detention itself was legally permissible, the next question became: what standards must govern that detention when the people being held are children? That shift in focus is what led, several years later, to the Flores Settlement Agreement in 1997.

Reno v. Flores matters not because it created protections for minors, but because it clarified the scope of the government’s authority. The settlement that followed would be an attempt to place practical limits on how that authority could be exercised in real detention settings.

While Reno v. Flores addressed unaccompanied minors, the subsequent Flores Settlement Agreement applies not only to unaccompanied minors, but also to children who arrive as part of family units, making it a nationwide framework for the treatment of all immigrant children in federal custody.

It required that children be held in safe and sanitary facilities, that they be provided with basic necessities such as food, water, and medical care, and that they be placed in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their age and any special needs. It also established a general presumption that children should be released from custody without unnecessary delay, preferably to a parent, legal guardian, or other qualified sponsor. In practice, the agreement generally requires that children be released or transferred to a licensed, non-secure care, unless limited exceptions apply, such as surges in arrivals or specific safety concerns.

Importantly, the FSA was not a statute passed by Congress or a Supreme Court ruling. It was a negotiated agreement enforced by a federal court, meaning its authority depends on ongoing compliance and judicial oversight rather than a single definitive ruling.

In practical terms, this means the settlement operates like a set of binding minimum standards that immigration authorities must follow whenever they detain children, regardless of policy changes or shifts in administration.

This structure has made the settlement both durable and contested. Over time, it has been interpreted, modified, and repeatedly litigated as different administrations have tested the boundaries of its requirements. One of the most persistent points of tension has been how quickly children must be released and what qualifies as a “safe and appropriate” setting for detention in practice.

Because the agreement relies on judicial enforcement rather than legislative enforcement, compliance often depends on litigation and court monitoring rather than automatic administrative enforcement. This makes its protections legally binding, but uneven in practice.

In theory, the Flores Settlement Agreement was designed to fill the gap left open by Reno v. Flores, by placing concrete limits on how children could be detained. In practice, its enforcement has remained uneven, and its standards continue to be the subject of legal and political dispute.

You might be wondering how children move through immigration detention today.

Once children enter federal immigration custody, their movement through the system is shaped by the legal standards established under the FSA.

At intake, children are classified either as unaccompanied minors or as part of a family unit. That designation determines which federal authority assumes responsibility for their care and what procedural pathway follows.

From there, children move into what the legal framework describes as temporary custody while placement and release decisions are processed. That process includes identifying potential sponsors, verifying family relationships, and determining whether release or transfer to a licensed facility is possible.

As described in analysis from the Congressional Research Service, these steps are meant to structure how children move out of initial custody through either release or placement in non-secure, licensed care.

However, what becomes clear from enforcement litigation and monitoring reports—particularly those filed by the National Center for Youth Law in the Flores case—is that this period of “temporary custody” is also where conditions of confinement become most consequential.

Across multiple filings and declarations submitted to the court, children describe and monitors document, environments where basic necessities are inconsistently provided. Reports reference limited access to hygiene items such as soap, clean clothing, and showers, as well as restrictions on adequate food and drinking water in some facilities.

They also describe overcrowded holding spaces, extreme cold temperatures, and lights kept on continuously, all of which contribute to disrupted sleep and heightened stress for the children in custody.

In some facilities, children have reported spending extended periods without meaningful access to outdoor time, education, or recreation while they await processing or transfer.

These conditions are documented alongside concerns about medical access, including delays in care and the spread of illness in confined environments where children are held together for extended periods.

Taken together, the record described in these court filings and monitoring reports shows that the same procedural period defined as temporary custody is also the space where children experience the material reality of the system while their cases are being processed. What this reveals is that movement through the immigration custody system is not separate from conditions, it is shaped by them. The time required for verification, placement, and transfer directly determines how long children remain in environments where those conditions persist.

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And it is in that space—between what the law requires and how long those steps actually take—that children remain in custody where they are exposed to harmful conditions of detention.

What this suggests is that the significance of the Flores framework is not only in the standards it establishes, but in how those standards depend on procedural time and institutional capacity to take effect.

In that sense, the central issue is not the presence of protections in law, but how they operate when their realization is mediated through systems that do not function uniformly across facilities or moments.

In the next conversation, we will turn to that question of enforcement with Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia Law School professor and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, whose more than a decade of work on immigrant children’s rights has focused directly on how these legal protections are applied, challenged, and enforced in practice.