FILE – Two migrants, part of a small group, are seeing through the mesh of the border fence as they camp outside a gate in El Paso, Texas, Friday, May 12, 2023. Migrant children in makeshift camps along the U.S.-Mexico border who are waiting to be processed by Border Patrol are in the agency’s custody _ something the agency had denied _ and said the Department of Homeland Security must quickly process them and place them in facilities that are “safe and sanitary.”(AP Photo/Andres Leighton, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Migrant children who wait in makeshift camps along the U.S.-Mexico border for the Border Patrol to process them are in the agency’s custody and are subject to a long-standing court-supervised agreement that set standards for their treatment, a judge ruled.
The issue of when the children are officially in Border Patrol custody is particularly important because of the 1997 …