Over at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Mike Riggs writes of an immigration case that is indicative of the broken nature of the nation’s immigration system. Nadia Habib is a junior psychology major and an honor student who is attending Stony Brook University in New York. Her father has a green card and has been living in the United States for 20 years, and all three of her siblings are American citizens.

Yet despite living in the United States since she was brought here by her mother when she was 20 months old, she is expected to be deported back to Bangladesh alongside her mom tomorrow. “I feel like I’m just going to be in a room depressed. I don’t know anybody there. I don’t speak the language,” Habib told a local news station.

Her planned deportation comes at a time when the Obama administration has made repeated promises to focus its deportation on immigrants who’ve committed crimes while in the U.S. “Although Obama has promised not to be going after non-criminal cases, he’s going after Nadia and her mom,” noted Hunter College student Sonia Guinansaca, who works with the New York State Youth Leadership Council and is fighting Habib’s deportation. Local students have launched campaigns on Facebook in her support and Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) has spoken up against her deportation as well. Both Habib and her mother are expected to be deported at 11 a.m. tomorrow.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts designates federal judicial vacancies in courts where the current number of judges are wholly inadequate to address the court’s caseload as “judicial emergencies.” Yet, as a new issue Center for America Progress issue brief shows, fully 200 million Americans now live in a jurisdiction facing a judicial emergency:

Some of these courts have such a serious shortage of judges that they are barely able to function. In Arizona, for example, the federal trial court’s felony caseload has nearly doubled in just two years from 3,023 in 2008 to 5,219 in 2010 — causing tremendous delays for all other litigants. Similarly, in southern Texas, a federal trial judge’s criminal caseload can be nearly six times normal. According to Judge W. Royal Furgeson, this means that judges are only able to devote as much time to major trials as judges in “night traffic court” devote to small fines for minor driving offenses.

Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn, a George H.W. Bush appointee, just issued an opinion striking down parts of Alabama’s newly-enacted anti-immigrant law. Although the opinion blocks several of the law’s provisions, including the provision making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to work, the opinion leaves untouched a provision of Alabama law requiring public schools to systematically determine the immigration status of public school students and to report the number of undocumented students in their district to the state.

Very few undocumented families will be willing to send their children to public school if the school is collecting data on whether or not they should be deported. Accordingly, today’s decision is a victory for Alabama’s efforts to intimidate undocumented families from sending their children to school, and will almost certainly encourage state lawmakers who share Alabama’s hostility towards immigrants to enact copycat laws.

It’s not at all clear, however, that this decision will be upheld on appeal. Judge Blackburn’s opinion relies on irrelevant distinctions, misrepresents binding Supreme Court precedent, and even ignores the plain language of the Alabama law. The meat of the law being challenged in this lawsuit provides that:

Every public elementary and secondary school in this state, at the time of enrollment in kindergarten or any grade in such school, shall determine whether the student enrolling in public school was born outside the jurisdiction of the United States or is the child of an alien not lawfully present in the United States and qualifies for assignment to an English as Second Language class or other remedial program.

The statute accomplishes this goal by setting up an elaborate records checking process. First, all school children are required to present their birth certificate to the school. If the child was born outside the United States or they fail to provide a birth certificate, then their family must either provide the school with official documentation of the student’s immigration status or swear under penalty of perjury that the child is lawfully present. All children whose families fail to complete these steps will be presumed to be in the country illegally.

Bizarrely, Judge Blackburn concluded that this decision does not violate a Supreme Court decision forbidding states from requiring immigrants to register with the state. Even more bizarrely, Blackburn also concluded that the Alabama law “does not compel school officials to determine the immigration status of a parent of a student.” Perhaps she missed the part of the law where it says that “[e]very public elementary and secondary school in this state . . . shall determine whether the student enrolling in public school was born outside the jurisdiction of the United States or is the child of an alien not lawfully present in the United States.”

So the good news is that Blackburn’s reasoning is very weak and is unlikely be particularly convincing to a court of appeals. The bad news is that her decision appeals to the extremely conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit — the same appeals court that recently ignored nearly 200 years of Supreme Court precedent to strike down part of the Affordable Care Act.

Additionally, it is worth noting that today’s decision rested solely on the narrow legal grounds that Alabama’s law is not “preempted” by federal law. It did not consider the looming question of whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Plyer v. Doe, which forbids public schools from denying an education to undocumented immigrants, invalidates Alabama’s attempt to systematically intimidate undocumented families against sending their kids to school. A group of immigration advocates filed a lawsuit claiming that the Alabama law violates Plyer and a decision could come down on that case as soon as today.

Should the Alabama law ultimately be upheld, however, it will do nothing to actually deport the millions of undocumented families living in the United States. What it will do, however, is create an entire generation of Alabama residents who, having been denied their right to be educated, will grow up with few options other than crime or exploitation.

The moment President Obama started nominating new judges, Senate Republicans launched an unprecedented campaign of obstruction against his nominees. Indeed, federal judges are now retiring at more than twice the rate that they are being replaced, an unsustainable course that will eventually shutdown the judiciary’s ability to function. Both of President Obama’s two predecessors appointed far more judges at this point in their presidencies:

Some of this pressure will be released in the next two weeks, as the Senate reached a deal to confirm 10 pending nominees. Yet, as Nicole Flatow notes, the real story here is the 17 nominees who are ready for confirmation votes but will nonetheless remain behind a wall of obstructionism:

The deal moves forward several long-delayed nominees, but follows a pattern that has developed of leaving to languish many other nominees with bipartisan support. Among the 17 pending nominees that were not included in the deal, four have been awaiting a vote by the Senate since the 111th Congress, and six are considered judicial emergencies by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Additionally, only one of the 10 nominees who will receive votes is a court of appeals nominee — the rest are nominated to relatively low-ranking district courts. And that sole court of appeals nominee, Judge Henry Floyd, is a George W. Bush appointee to the district court who is at least as much the choice of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as he is the choice of President Obama.

There is some good news in this recent package of soon-to-be-confirmed judges. Most notably, the package includes Allison Nathan, an openly gay attorney and former Supreme Court clerk. Still, Nathan and her nine new colleagues will do very little to overcome the growing vacancy crisis facing the federal bench.

Former Pennsylvania state judge Michael Conahan was sentenced last Friday to 210 months in prison for his involvement in a scandal to enrich private prison corporations by sentencing juvenile pranksters and other extremely minor offenders to be incarcerated in a corporate-run facility:

Michael Conahan, a former jurist in Luzerne County, was sentenced on Friday to 210 months in custody by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Edwin M. Kosik II. Conahan was also ordered to pay $874,000 in restitution. [...] As Main Justice reported in August, Ciavarella, former president judge of the Court of Common Pleas and former judge of the Juvenile Court for Luzerne County, was sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to make restitution of $965,930. [...]

Conahan’s role in the “cash for kids” scheme was to order the closing of a county-run detention center, clearing the way for Ciavarella, once known as a strict “law and order” judge, to send young offenders to private facilities. This arrangement worked out well for Ciavarella and Conahan, as well as the builder of the facilities and a developer, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

The arrangement didn’t work out so well for the young offenders, some of them sent away for offenses that were little more than pranks and would have merited probation, or perhaps just scoldings, if the judges had tried to live up to their oaths.

Sadly, this kind of behavior by the private prisons industry is not at all surprising. The industry spent millions in lobbying dollars to push harsh criminal penalties and longer sentences in order to maximize their own profitability. Leading lawmakers like Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) each supported major prison privatization plans after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the industry. Indeed, the number of prisoners incarcerated in corporate-run facilities grew by 37 percent during a seven-year period when their lobbying efforts also grew by 165 percent.

Nevertheless, the willingness of two judges to simply trade away their judicial oaths to benefit a corporation’s bottom line is truly shocking.

A powerful Republican leader in the Alabama state Senate apologized yesterday for referring to African Americans as “aborigines,” calling his comments “careless and unnecessary.” State Sen. Scott Beason (R) was recorded making the comments as part of an undercover investigation, the tapes of which were played in court, the AP reports:

Beason was recorded making the remarks about gamblers in predominantly black Greene County. He made the recordings while helping the FBI investigate claims of lawmakers being bribed by gambling interests to pass a bill legalizing video poker games. In one transcript, Beason and two other Republican legislators were talking about economic development in Greene County and the customers at one of its largest employers, Greenetrack casino in Eutaw.

“That’s y’all’s Indians,” one Republican said.

“They’re aborigines, but they’re not Indians,” Beason replied.

Beason’s comments were played several months ago, but he is only now apologizing. Beason has a history of making offensive comments about racial minorities, including saying that lawmakers should “empty the clip” to stop undocumented immigration, and state Democrats are calling for him to resign or at least be removed as chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee. “Racism should have no place in the Alabama Senate. It is in the best interest of all Alabamians that he resign immediately,” said state Sen. Vivian Figures (D), who is African American.

But the Senate Republican Caucus said Beason will be allowed him to retain his position, saying his apology was sufficient. “The Republicans have a supermajority,” said state Democratic chairman Mark Kennedy, “And this is the man they choose to lead one of the most powerful committees in the Legislature.”