President Donald Trump is in a showdown with the House and Senate over his demand for border wall funding. As the government shutdown goes into its second week, the Washington Post editorial board mocked the president for causing more problems on the border while he demands his wall.
"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 Post wrote in its New Year's Day editorial. "They are among many hundreds of others whose cases will be postponed for years — or, in effect, indefinitely — for every day the closure lasts."
Many of the effects of the shutdown have been the daily lives and finances of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, contractors and government-funded programs and scientists. Left out of the cable news coverage are about 400 immigration judges that have been told not to work.
"The immigration courts are already massively jammed: The backlog is now 1.1 million cases," the editorial continues. It means every day that the shutdown persists, thousands of cases aren't being heard. They'll ultimately be rescheduled three or four years from this shutdown, when Trump might not even be president anymore.
"In fact, the backlog has reached such gargantuan proportions that judges are already double- and triple-booking future court dates, like an airline overbooking flights, meaning that many cases on the docket will inevitably be postponed repeatedly," said the Post.
Trump has already raged against the immigration courts and judges, saying that he wants to eliminate the Constitution's "due process" Amendment for immigrants.
Trump has incorrectly claimed that when courts release immigrants into the United States with a court date, they rarely show up. The fact is that the overwhelming majority do appear for their court date.
"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," the Post closed. "A president who attacks “catch and release ” now embraces a policy that ensures indefinite release. A president hungry for ever more deportations now ensures that thousands of would-be deportees get reprieves. And a president who conjures migrant no-shows in courts manages to close the courts entirely."
