Digging a bigger and bigger hole

By Maria Sacchetti and Michael E. Miller
January 25 at 4:10 PM

Mario Guerrero raced up the slick sidewalk to the Arlington immigration court on Thursday. Everyone had told him his deportation hearing was canceled, but he couldn’t believe it.

Neither could Ariel Lopez, 44, who stuffed his immigration papers in a plastic bag and hopped on a bus to get there. Or a 71-year-old woman from Guatemala, who drove from Richmond with her daughter, and would not give her name.

They arrived at a towering office building on South Bell Street to find a skeleton staff — just four judges instead of about 15 — and a court that had shrunk from three floors to one. The only hearings were via television for immigrants in detention centers. Signs taped to the walls said the rest would be rescheduled when the shutdown ended ...

The country’s longest-ever government shutdown, launched by President Trump in the name of border security, ended Friday — at least temporarily. But the damage to the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts will likely last for years ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/digging-a-bigger-and-bigger-hole-shutdown-stalls-trumps-deportation-efforts/2019/01/25/0f30c6fa-1f59-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html