The Role of Legal Orientation Program in Affecting Immigration Court Case Processing Times

• Activity Number: 465
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Zhifen Cheng*+
• Companies: Vera Institute of Justice
• Keywords: immigration ; court ; history event

Abstract

Since 2005, the Vera Institute of Justice has been contracted by the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the nation's immigration courts, to manage and evaluate its Legal Orientation Program which is a multi-site program providing legal rights information to non-citizens detained by the DHS. The evaluation of the LOP, aiming to assess its impact on case outcomes and the immigration courts, found that cases for LOP participants took fewer days to go through the immigration courts than those for detainees not participating in the program. As a follow-up to that finding, we conducted a history event analysis of the immigration court data and the LOP program data, taking into consideration the fact that analysis of completed cases alone would cause estimation bias. The results confirmed statistically that LOP accounted for shorter case processing times for detained cases. Because of the immigration court system's relatively brief history, there was no rigorous prior research focused on case processing times of immigration court cases. Our study contributed to the development of the field by analysis beyond basic descriptive statistics.