Evidently, the shutdown is affecting some people,
like the immigration courts.
“You’re shutting down the immigration court over the issue of immigration,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, the judges union.
Why do judges need a union?
Immigration courts are whittled to a skeleton staff, forcing court dates to be postponed and raising the ire of the judges already burdened by nearly 770,000 pending cases.
I doubt that they were "whittled". Perhaps more accurately, they were forced to furlough those personnel who are deemed unessential. Which begs the question of hwy they have a backlog?
I'm curious how many workers are actually affected by the shutdown. The 2013 shutdown that affected the whole government furloughed about 850,000 workers. I hear the claim that this time, 800,000 workers are affected - but this time only about 25% of the government is shutdown, so either the number is wrong or the government grew a huge amount in the last 5 years. Given the state of our media, and that I can't find any support for the number, I suspect someone repeated the number from 2013 and nobody questioned it.
ReplyDeleteAfter some research, the number of affected workers appears to be about 400,000 based on this Washington Post article:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/shutdown-federal-worker-impact/?utm_term=.4e541107f729
As far as it says, there are about 800,000 total federal civilian workers and about half are in the affected agencies and departments. I don't know how accurate these numbers are, but so far they are the best I have found.