lawsuit settlement

For more than a quarter-century, a lawsuit settlement from a case brought in Los Angeles federal court has dictated conditions for children held in immigration detention.

But now, the long-standing settlement — which set minimum standards for housing, education and medical care for migrant kids in federal custody, while strictly limiting how long they can remain there — hangs in the balance in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after a challenge by the Trump administration.

At the same time, the federal judge in L.A. who presides over the agreement appears poised to appoint a powerful new enforcer to uphold it.

President Trump has long sought to scrap the Flores settlement, which dates back to the Clinton era. In recent months, the Trump administration has waged a legal battle to cancel the agreement, while also pleading with the district court not to order an independent monitor to boost its compliance.

“[Flores] is the only thing standing between them and indefinite detention of families,” said Leecia Welch, chief legal director at Children’s Rights, a plaintiff in the case.

Last month, Assistant Atty. Gen. Brett A. Shumate pressed the 9th Circuit court to give the administration “the thumbs-up or thumbs-down” on its bid to tear up the settlement and end what he called “judicial micromanagement” of federal immigration policy.

“The Flores consent decree is an agreement which goes well above the constitutional floor,” Shumate told the court during oral arguments in June. “We’re asking that [the Department of Homeland Security’s] compliance with the law be assessed based on the law, not a 30-year-old settlement agreement.”

The three-judge panel sharply questioned the Justice Department’s legal claims, saying little had changed since the government last petitioned the court to have the agreement dissolved in 2020 — a request that was rejected.

The judges also pressed Trump administration lawyers to respond to evidence from scores of declarations filed in district court since last summer, in which detainees describe struggling to sleep in freezing, brightly lit rooms, vomiting from eating spoiled food, and begging for diapers, baby formula and asthma inhalers.

“You’ve said a lot of the reason you’re doing this is to discourage families from coming in the first place, so you’re basically punishing children because their parents brought them here,” Judge Marsha S. Berzon said.

Berzon, a Clinton appointee who issued a fiery dissent last year in a case that challenged the administration’s use of armed troops in immigration enforcement operations, asked: “You’re saying there’s no constitutional problem there?”

“I understand the detention of children at the border is a controversial policy issue, but that’s a policy decision,” Shumate said.

Just a day earlier, Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee scolded a pair of government attorneys from her bench in Los Angeles, signaling she would probably appoint a new special master to force compliance with the settlement agreement.

“We’re talking about 11 years of this,” Gee said during the June 1 status conference. “None of these issues are new to me. These are all issues on which I have issued orders. I am very displeased about the fact that my orders are being disregarded and are not being complied with, not in good faith.”

“Both sides seem to be operating in different planes of reality,” Gee said.

The disputed settlement emerged from a 1985 lawsuit over the fate of 15-year-old Jenny Flores, a Salvadoran refugee who was picked up by federal immigration enforcement and left to languish in detention in Pasadena. At the time, there was little awareness that children were among the tens of thousands of migrants fleeing civil war and state collapse in Central America — with virtually no U.S. government infrastructure to protect them.

“It was a surprise,” said Benjamin Roth, a professor at the University of South Carolina College of Social Work and an expert on the agreement. “There was no thought then that there were kids in this mix.”

The current court fight centers on an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, run by the private prison company CoreCivic, where the vast majority of children and families in immigration custody are held.

In court filings earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has “maintained core Flores-related services” at Dilley and argued its length-of-stay numbers were skewed by a small number of families it was forced to keep because they are considered “national security risks.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection likewise boasted its July 1 report “shows our highest level of compliance to date.”

Immigrant rights advocates called those claims “a fiction.”

“We see the same sorts of problems and concerns and misery that we’ve been seeing for the last 15 months,” said Welch, the Children’s Rights attorney.

In dozens of declarations collected as part of the court record, detainees recounted broccoli full of worms, diapers doled out one at a time, and staff tearing up children’s drawings.

One mother said medical staff laughed off her 8-year-old’s broken arm. Another said she was denied treatment for hepatitis B, even after doctors told her she could develop liver cancer and pass the infection on to her unborn daughter.

Still others described unexplained rashes, outbreaks of diarrhea and infestations of lice, among a host of other maladies for which many said they were offered only Tylenol or allergy medication. Even Christmas brought misery in the form of an ICE agent dressed up as Santa, who shoved away children trying to hug him, according to the detainee declarations submitted to the court.

“What happened on Christmas Day can only be described as an atrocity,” one mother recalled. Children “dropped everything, ran up to him, begged for candy and wanted to take pictures. Some children even cried and begged him for their freedom. Santa himself acted very indifferent.”

The Department of Justice argued that immigrant kids could still sue over poor conditions if the Flores settlement is unwound. But experts say existing protections would collapse without the legal architecture of the consent decree to support them.

“[Under the settlement], the federal government has built out a very efficient system to provide temporary care for kids,” Roth said. “If Flores is dissolved, it’s not going to be easy to stand up this same set of programs.”

If the Trump administration loses before the 9th Circuit, the fight over Flores could soon escalate to the Supreme Court.

“I’d be shocked if the 9th Circuit rules for the government, and I’d be shocked if the Trump administration doesn’t appeal,” said Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University and an expert on the high court.

But consent decrees are legally and politically complicated, and the treatment of migrant children further tangles the situation. Given the legal and political complexity, the Supreme Court could rule to keep the settlement in place, or decline to take the case at all, experts said.

“It’s more likely than not the court would stay away from this,” Segall said.

For now, both the district judge and the 9th Circuit panel appear fed up.

“I think my patience has come to an end,” Gee said during the recent hearing in her Los Angeles courtroom.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Thursday to crack down on inflated profits stemming from car crash lawsuits, blessing a hard-fought compromise between Uber and the state’s trial attorneys that averts a November showdown between two of California’s most powerful and moneyed lobbying forces.

The deal, the fruit of months of negotiations, takes aim at the lucrative way doctors can charge for procedures on patients referred to them by personal injury lawyers.

If a law firm has a client who was hurt in a car accident, the lawyer will often send them to a doctor who will perform surgery on a “lien” basis, meaning the doctor will be paid from money that comes from a lawsuit settlement rather than through insurance.

Uber contends this arrangement has created an incentive for doctors and attorneys to collude to dramatically inflate medical bills. The more expensive the bill, they say, the bigger the resulting payout.

The law, SB 623, caps how much these doctors can charge when their patient is involved in a lawsuit against a ride-share company, which are frequent targets of litigation due to their top-of-the-line insurance policies. The new law will also require Uber to ramp up background checks of its drivers.

“We’re going to have a much safer state both for medical patients and passengers in Ubers,” said Nicholas Rowley, a prominent Texas attorney who helped bankroll the fight and took a leading role in the negotiations.

The law only applies to cases that involve ride-share accidents that take place after Jan. 1, 2027.

“This legislation puts meaningful guardrails in place to better protect accident victims, increase transparency and accountability in the medical lien system and strengthen safety,” said Ramona Prieto, Uber’s head of public policy for the Western U.S., in a statement.

For months, Uber and lawyers from across the state poured tens of millions into dueling ballot measures that threatened to devastate the profits of whichever side lost.

Uber fired the first shot with a ballot measure that sought to cap how much attorneys can earn in lawsuits involving auto accidents. The company argued attorneys were swindling their own clients, inflating medical bills of car crash victims to increase the value of the settlement and then pocketing a hefty chunk of the payouts.

The state’s trial attorneys countered that the fee cap would make small or difficult cases a money-losing endeavor and block scores of accident victims from the courts. They shot back with their own ballot measure that would increase legal liability for ride-share companies if a passenger or driver is sexually assaulted while on a ride, seizing on investigative reporting that highlighted assaults in Ubers.

“They were waiting for us to blink and we didn’t,” said Douglas Saeltzer, the head of the Consumer Attorneys of California, the lawyer trade group that pushed for the measure against Uber. “Their starting place, I don’t believe, was in the interest of protecting victims — it was in the interest of protecting Uber.”

With the passage of Thursday’s law, both sides have agreed to pull their respective measures from the November ballot, halting campaigns that had both parties amassing tens of millions in funding and blanketing the airwaves with ads.

“Now we can stop seeing all the commercials,” said Assemblymember Blanca Pancheo (D-Downey) at a Tuesday hearing.

The law, put forward by Assemblymember Diane Papan (D-San Mateo) and Sen. Thomas Umberg (D-Santa Ana), also caps the amount that can be earned by third-party investors who buy out a doctor’s lien in a personal injury case. These companies will purchase a doctor’s stake in the case at a reduced rate, then pocket a share of the payout if the case settles.

“Private equity and hedge funds buy them at a steep discount, then turn around and collect the full inflated amount,” Saeltzer said at a Tuesday hearing on the bill. “That’s money flowing to Wall Street investors, not patients.”

The law will require annual background checks for ride-share drivers and expand the list of offenses that disqualify someone from the job.

In addition to the ballot battle, has Uber sued two of LA’s most well-known personal injury firms — the Law Offices of Jacob Emrani and Downtown L.A. Law Group — accusing them of inflating medical bills and forcing clients to undergo needless and expensive surgeries to inflate the value of the claim. The firms asked the judge to dismiss the case Wednesday, arguing Uber had failed to prove fraud. Both firms have vehemently denied wrongdoing.

The lawsuit, filed last year, has put the plaintiff lawyers in the unusual position of playing defense. Listening in the audience at Wednesday’s hearings were the partners of Downtown L.A. Law Group and Jacob Emrani.

“Let’s be clear about what this Uber case really is,” said John Hueston, outside counsel for Emrani. “It’s brought by a $150 billion dollar company … to intimidate the plaintiff’s bar, exhaust its resources and chill the suits that hold Uber accountable.”

Michael Huston, one of the lawyers who represents Uber, countered that the case is “not an attack on the plaintiff’s bar.”

“We have brought suit against the two in this state … that are engaged in naked fraud,” he said.