Shutdown at court

A New York moment:

A recorded message played when I called the immigration court in New York to see if hearings were happening this week: “Please be advised that due to a lapse in appropriations, court operations are limited to cases involving detained individuals. Non-detained cases will be rescheduled when the court reopens for regular operations.”

Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration project estimated on Jan. 11 that 5,320 immigration hearings had been canceled in New York since the shutdown. That’s the second-highest number in the country after California, where 9,424 individuals’ hearings had been canceled.

For each week the shutdown continues, 20,000 more immigration hearings will be canceled. For individuals here without legal status, that means their cases will be heavily delayed. In other words, the shutdown could in this aspect turn out to be somewhat self-defeating for President Trump’s overall goal of tightening control of illegal immigration.

Immigration courts were already slammed, but the shutdown has so far pushed back cases an estimated three to four years. Talking about the backlog, immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks told PBS: “There has been a big focus on immigration enforcement. There has not been sufficient focus on the immigration court system.”

In the meantime, on a related question of citizenship, one Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday left no doubt that he had reported for work amid the shutdown. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman released a heated 277-page opinion on the case challenging the addition to the U.S. census of a question about citizenship. Furman ruled mostly against the Trump administration on including the question.

“The court’s opinion is, to put it mildly, long,” Furman wrote.

Worth your time:

Fleming Rutledge writes about men she knows who are not reading literary fiction. Have you found this to be true in your circles? I like the list of books that she recommends, particularly works from Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and Anthony Trollope. I know several male Trollope fans, but I don’t know if that’s the norm.

Rutledge asks: Why focus on literary fiction? “As has been noted by many cultural analysts over many years, good fiction stirs up empathy and depth of understanding of human nature,” she wrote. “Moreover, it trains the ear for language, and tunes the perceptions for excellence of expression. It guards against sentimentality, the enemy of true understanding.”

This week I learned:

That drug lord El Chapo, like the shrewd businessman he is, wanted to capitalize on all the media coverage about him and write a book that he would turn into a movie. “Despite being short on experience, Mr. Guzmán wanted to direct,” The New York Times’ Alan Feuer writes in a clever turn of phrase (the name “El Chapo” means “short one”). The movie project never got off the ground.

Culture I am consuming:

Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, which tells the story of the remarkable Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of the now-massive Partners In Health. I think I prefer Kidder’s other book, Strength in What Remains, which tells the story of a survivor of the Burundian genocide. That mass slaughter happened about the same time as the Rwandan genocide, but it is a story that had almost no journalistic coverage outside of Kidder’s book.

Email me with tips, story ideas, and feedback at ebelz@wng.org