A woman carries her belongings into the Benedictine Monastery shortly after arriving as part of a group of migrants transported by the Department of Homeland Security from El Paso to Tucson on Feb. 21, 2019.
Noah Schramm with the ACLU says the new directive is a significant improvement on the current policy and has a robust list of items that are now deemed essential and therefore have to be stored and returned.
“Another contribution of the guidance is to broadly say that it is the policy that CBP should allow people to keep as much of their personal property as possible,” he says. “That was not said or even implicit in existing policies. So that is a pretty significant change as well.”
But he says there are ambiguities in the directive that require additional guidance, including at which immigration facilities the directive applies and when border officials are required to return migrants’ belongings. Under the current policy, migrants were sometimes required to return to facilities that could be far away to retrieve their belongings.
The directive released earlier this month will likely go into effect in September.
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