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. The immigration courts are already massively jammed: The backlog is now 1.1 million cases. Take the example of undocumented immigrants with clean records who have been in the United States for more than a decade. 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.

Source: Washington Post January 01, 2019 21:56 UTC