Abstract
Every day in immigration courts across the US, judges hold hearings to determine whether the foreign nationals in their dockets (technically called respondents) should be removed from the country or, instead, allowed to stay. In these hearings, judges have latitude in choosing procedural steps that may, eventually, result in the foreign nationals being removed. The goal of this research is to assess whether judges respond to being observed by law students and other trained observers and, in particular, whether being observed makes a judge more motivated to provide flexibility to the individuals appearing before them and more responsive to the requests for continuances or other needs.
To this end, we will train Observers (law students and others) to attend these public hearings and take notes about the procedures used. Observation may be in person or remote through the WEBEX viewer.
The procedure will be to randomize Observers to hearings, and then compare the procedural choices made in observed hearings (treatment) with those made in hearings not observed (controls). In addition, we want to know whether any difference in procedural choice might be due only to the judge’s heightened concern about making “improper” choices while being audited, or whether the judge might also respond to the judges’ supervisor knowledge about the particular judge rendering “improper” decisions while being audited. The EOIR requires the judges and their support staff to code each procedural choice in the individual hearings. This data is released pursuant to standing FOIA requests on the EOIR website. We will be focusing on the observations in three New York City area immigration courts which is one of the largest adjudication workloads in the national system.
The number of treated hearings will be determined based on the available budget. We expect an Observer-day to cost about $75, and an Observer audits one hearing a day. EOIR procedures divide regular removal hearings into status dockets called "Master Calendars" and merits hearings called "Individual Hearings." Master Calendars vary in size but average between 30 and 50 individuals in a four hour sitting. Our observations are only of Master Calendars. In these hearings (or dockets), the judge may take a wide variety of actions primarily related to scheduling or setting deadlines for applications such as asylum relief. Cases can be concluded during a Master Calendar hearing.
Given the available budget ($20,000), we expect to be able to “treat” about 266 hearings. The number of control hearings will exceed the number of treated hearings.