Bedtime Stories for Public Servants: Legally Defensible

By the time the email arrived, Amir had already stopped opening emails with both hands.

He knew the shape of collapse now. It began politely.

Thank you again for your patience.

Then came the long sentence, the one designed to distribute responsibility so thinly that no one had to hold it.

Due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding employment authorization and federal adjudication timelines, we are unable to move forward at this time.

At this time.

Amir read the phrase three times. It sounded almost merciful, as if time were a small inconvenience and not the thing being taken from him.

On the kitchen table sat his doctoral regalia receipt, an unpaid electric bill, an expired conference badge and the USCIS case tracker open on his laptop.

Case Is Being Actively Reviewed.

Day 765.

He called his father.

In Washington, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services answered on the fourth ring.

“Amir jan?”

His father’s voice was quiet. Not gentle quiet. Institutional quiet. The kind shaped by fluorescent lights, sealed windows, thick carpet and years spent inside rooms where lives were rearranged by signatures instead of raised voices.

“I got another one,” Amir said.

His father did not ask what.

“I’m sorry.”

Amir laughed once. Not because anything was funny, but because apology had become another administrative form.

“I earned a Ph.D.”

Silence.

Then his father said, “You’re from Iran.”

“I published seven peer-reviewed articles.”

“You’re from Iran.”

“I won fellowships. Awards. Grants. Tens of thousands of dollars. I served on boards. I mentored students from New York to California. I taught. I wrote. I gave public lectures. I helped cities think through housing and energy policies.”

“You’re from Iran.”

Amir stood and walked to the window.

“I missed my cousin’s wedding.”

His father said nothing.

“I missed my mother, sick in a hospital room I couldn’t reach. I watched my grandmother being buried through a phone held by someone whose hand kept shaking.”

The line remained open.

“I worked nights, weekends, holidays. I kept telling myself, become useful. Become excellent. Become impossible to discard.”

His father breathed in.

“Baba,” Amir said, and the word broke in his mouth, “what else was I supposed to become?”

In Washington, paper moved.

His father said, “The pause is not written as punishment.”

Amir closed his eyes.

“There it is.”

“What?”

“The language.”

His father did not answer.

“Say it,” Amir said. “Say what you call it there.”

A long silence.

Then, in English, his father said, “A temporary adjudicative hold pending enhanced review protocols.”

Amir pressed his forehead to the cold glass.

“That sentence is killing people.”

“It was designed to be defensible.”

“Not humane?”

“Defensible.”

Amir imagined his father at the head of a conference table while people discussed him without knowing his name. Not Amir. Not son. Not teacher, neighbor, husband, friend. A category. A risk field. A nationality attached to a queue.

“Did you sign it?” Amir asked.

His father did not answer quickly enough.

“It was not about you.”

“That’s the violence,” Amir said. “That’s exactly the violence. It doesn’t have to be about me to destroy me.”

“We knew there would be hardship.”

“Hardship?” Amir turned from the window. “This feels more like a suffocating trap.”

“Seventeen years of higher education, and now I wake up every morning knowing that by graduating, the proudest achievement of my life might also be the thing that destroys the only legal stability I still have. Job offers disappear because nobody can wait indefinitely for immigration timelines anymore. Having a permanent residency case sit untouched for years while your life decays around it. Do you understand what that does to someone? I’ve applied to more than a hundred jobs. Faculty jobs. Postdocs. Research positions. At first people sound excited. Then immigration enters the conversation and something changes. Their voices soften. Meetings become careful. Everyone starts speaking in phrases like ‘unfortunately’ and ‘at this time.’ After a while, fear enters everything. Renewing a lease feels dangerous. Graduating feels dangerous. Hoping feels dangerous. Even time starts feeling dangerous, because you realize the years you wanted to spend building a family are disappearing inside a government pause nobody can explain. And then the shame starts. You check your bank account before buying groceries because you’re terrified your card might decline in front of your wife, who sacrificed her own future to follow you here while you stand there with a Ph.D., wondering whether you can still afford two apples.”

His father whispered, “I know.”

“No,” Amir said. “You know the file. You don’t know the waiting.”

That wounded him. Amir heard it.

Good, he thought.

Then hated himself for wanting it to hurt.

“When you left Tehran,” his father said slowly, “I told everyone my son would build a life no government could ignore.”

Amir remembered the airport. His father’s hands on his shoulders. His mother crying into a tissue. The ridiculous pride of being young enough to believe sacrifice always matured into reward.

“You told me excellence would protect me.”

“I believed it.”

“And now?”

His father’s voice lowered.

“Now I think institutions eat excellence and call it evidence.”

Neither of them spoke.

On the laptop, the blue case-status circle continued spinning, though nothing was moving.

For a while, they listened to each other breathe.

“I’m tired, baba.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know where I belong anymore.”

His father said, in Farsi this time, “My son.”

That was all.

No policy. No reassurance. No argument left to make.

Only a father with no language left except love, and no power left to make love matter.

A Pause with the Civic Sage

The eggs arrived and neither of them touched them.

“I signed the renewal last Tuesday,” the director said. “Routine recertification. Twelve minutes. Four signatures.”

“Who else was in the room?”

“Legal. Policy. Two deputies.”

“And between the five of you,” the Civic Sage said, “who was responsible for it?”

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

The Sage picked up a spoon, then set it down.

“That’s the answer.”

Outside, a bus pulled away from the curb. The director watched it go.

“We built it that way deliberately,” he said. “Spread across enough desks, accountability becomes atmosphere. Nobody guilty. Nobody innocent. Just process.”

“And the people inside the process?”

“Accounted for.” He said it like a man hearing himself for the first time. “We called it projected delay burden. We attached a number. Acceptable threshold.”

“Acceptable to whom?”

“To the room.”

“Not to the people inside it.”

His coffee had gone cold without him noticing.

“No,” he said. “We never put anyone from inside it in the room.”

The eggs sat between them, untouched, going cold in the same direction.

Loose Ends

Public service is never merely technical, as bureaucratic systems can generate profound human suffering and gradually erode democratic norms through procedures framed as neutral, lawful and professionally defensible.

This story illustrates how administrative burden can evolve into administrative cruelty, operating not through overt coercion but through delay, uncertainty, categorization and diffused accountability. Responsibility becomes so dispersed that harm is reproduced through process itself rather than through clearly attributable individual action.

By reducing individuals to administrative categories, risk profiles and “acceptable thresholds,” institutions may normalize suffering while weakening accountability, transparency, human dignity and meaningful avenues of recourse.

Democratic backsliding can emerge not only through visible institutional rupture, but also through the routine practices and procedural logic of contemporary administration.

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Author: S. Mohsen Fatemi is a PhD candidate in the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas, where his research examines energy governance, policy, and justice. He is the creator of Bedtime Stories for Public Servants. This narrative series blends storytelling, reflective dialogue, and research-based insights to explore the ethical and emotional dilemmas faced in public service. He can be reached at [email protected]. His website is www.mohsenfatemi.com, and his X/Twitter handle is @MohsenFatemiii.