After recently being intercepted weeks ago by officials near the southern U.S. border, 9-year-old Honduran boy and 14-year-old El Salvadoran girl, identified as JSR and VFB in court documents, were relocated to a shelter in Noank, Connecticut. Judge Bolden’s decision, which orders the government to “take immediate steps to ameliorate the grave harm” caused by the separation of the children from their parents, is the first ruling in the country to find the government’s treatment of such cases in violation of the constitution. The court specifically ordered the government to deliver the children’s parents to Bridgeport July 18 for a scheduled status conference, provide daily video-conferencing between the children and their parents and propose a treatment plan. Next week, that begins with the children and their parents seeing each other face-to-face for the first time in months. “Judge Bolden’s ruling acknowledges the deep harm that the government inflicted on VFB and JSR by forcibly separating them from their parents,” said Yale Law School intern Hannah Schoen, who is assisting on the case with the college’s Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. “The children must be brought back together with their loving parents in an environment where they are safe, comforted, and stress-free – in the community, not in a tent city in the desert.”

With the status of an estimated 2,000-plus immigrant children separated from their families hanging in the balance, two Connecticut organizations went to court Wednesday for an emergency hearing on behalf of two who have ended up in Connecticut.