IN THE name of securing the border and keeping out illegal immigrants, President Trump has opted for a partial government shutdown.
Irony of ironies, that shutdown has paralyzed the nation’s immigration courts, shuttering many of them and allowing several hundred undocumented immigrants to dodge deportation orders each day the shutdown continues.
They are among many hundreds of others whose cases will be postponed for years — or, in effect, indefinitely — for every day the closure lasts.
Those are among the more perverse effects of the Trump shutdown, which has resulted in many of the nation’s roughly 400 immigration judges receiving furlough orders, barring them from coming to work or hearing cases.
The immigration courts are already massively jammed: The backlog is now 1.1 million cases.
That means in the 11 days of the shutdown so far, thousands of cases have already been postponed.
What distinguishes the Trump shutdown is that it contravenes the president’s own long-standing insistence on a more rational and efficient immigration system, as he himself defines it. »
