No Vacation

Around 1pm EDT Sunday—yes, smack in the middle of Labor Day weekend—one of the most dramatic court hearings in recent memory got underway in Washington. US District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan wanted to get to the bottom of why the government was about to send dozens of unaccompanied Guatemalan children back to their home country. And by “about to send,” I mean that the kids were loaded onto airplanes that were set to take off.

For the judge, it had already been a long day. At 2:36 that morning, attorneys for the kids alerted her that the government was planning this operation. And, with the knowledge of how the Department of Homeland Security secretly renditioned hundreds of immigrants to a Salvadoran prison earlier this year, she was racing to ensure the kids’ rights were protected before the planes left US airspace.

Given the timing over the holiday weekend, many of you might’ve been grilling a burger or frolicking in the waves. But not reporters like Joshua Friedman, Anna Bower, and Kyle Cheney. They were tuned in to Sooknanan’s hearing and posting about it, in real time, so the rest of us could understand the gravity of the hearing and the candor of the judge as she interrogated the DOJ lawyer—especially as the government’s claim that the children wanted to return was effectively challenged by the plaintiffs.

Unlike Bower or Cheney, who write for Lawfare and Politico, respectively, Friedman is a freelancer who seems to cover hearings such as Sooknanan’s for the love of the game. He doesn’t have a law degree, though he has been writing about the courts on and off for more than a decade. Over time, he told me via email, he has come to appreciate the way human dramas play out within the four walls of a courtroom—“It’s theater! It’s philosophy! It’s justice!”—and that it is the journalist’s job to capture that, as well as to explain the arcana that lie behind decisions that shape our lives.