Sorokin

Alawieh’s lawyers asked a court to intervene, and Judge Leo Theodore Sorokin promptly barred her deportation in an order signed Friday.

Alawieh’s lawyers accused the government of “willfully” disobeying the court’s order, prompting Sorokin to demand an explanation.

The official explanation, then, is that the administration did not defy Sorokin’s order, but rather moved too fast for the judicial process to stop the deportation.

Neither Judge Sorokin nor Judge Boasberg believed that he was signing a meaningless order, and both judges demanded compliance that never came.

The retention center has procedures that purportedly adhere to due process, but as in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” or Vladimir Sorokin’s “The Queue,” where bureaucracy stands in the way of getting anywhere, every time it seems like Sara’s time in the facility is about to be over, something trivial occurs to push her hearing date back, or to otherwise deny her release.