Miriam Sweeney and Carolina Nunez, J. Reuben Clark School of Law

After hearing about the American asylum-seeking crisis, it wasn’t enough to know that attorneys around the country were pushing legislation to close family detention centers. I pored over articles about what makes American private corporations feel entitled to imprisoning children. In order to structure my research, I signed up for BYU’s Prelaw Review and was accepted as an author. I was determined to find something to solve this problem of family detention.
I followed the methodology dictated by the Law Review writing standards. I choose a topic— the treatment of children in private family detention centers in the United States— and researched case law that could have something to do with it. I found legal definitions of child safety and researched cases in which discrimination against the children of immigrants was overturned. I read everything I could about private detention centers, incorporating legal cases having to do with the practices of private prisons that also affected the smaller sample size of detention centers owned by the same companies.
Using this research, I compared practices of the treatment of children in U.S. detention centers to the results of medical analyses of mental and physical health of detained children in other countries (data was most readily available from Canada and Australia).
After consolidating and focusing my research, I determined that I would expound on the violation of the Flores Settlement Agreement. The settlement agreement requires a detention center to release its children to a responsible adult if the child’s safety was compromised. Using proof from previous cases and current reports, I focused on the breeches of mental/emotional and physical safety in the way detention centers treat children. I found court cases and relevant experiences to discuss throughout.
Armed with what I was learning from my research, I traveled to Karnes City, Texas, where I volunteered for a full week as an advocate for asylum-seeking immigrants in the very detention center I had focused my research. I collected evidence for my claims from the attorneys I worked with.
In April 2017, my research was published in the BYU Prelaw Review. In my conclusions, I argued for the cessation of the licensing of detention centers as childcare facilities as it only perpetuates the corruption of private prison companies’ tendency to capitalize on the vulnerability of the victims of crime detained there. This is easier said than done; the fight to license detention centers is well-funded, and most of the opposing force works pro bono. I believe that, with the circumstances of the violation of the Flores Settlement Agreement I brought to light in this paper, such a fight will be more easily won.