List of TRAC Fellows

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2026



• Seung Min Baik (Undergraduate , Economics and History, Yale University)
  The Impact of Asylum Adjudication Wait Times on Labor Market Participation
  My thesis looks at the impact of asylum wait times on asylum seekers’ labor market outcomes and fiscal contributions. Backlogs are a consistent issue in the United States asylum system—and applicants often have to wait months, if not years, for decisions. Wait times are an important consideration since they determine when exactly asylum seekers can access legal employment. Empirically, knowing that judge assignment to an asylum applicant is random, I hope to use judge- or court-specific processing speeds as instruments for individual wait times. At the judge-level, each judge will have a different way of managing their docket and have varying times to make decisions. And at the court-level, different geographies (not necessarily chosen by the applicants) will have varied caseloads that affect wait times as well. I hope my project can help us better understand how the timing of asylum adjudications may affect asylees’ economic trajectories. And perhaps, show that reducing backlogs is not only important at a humanitarian level, but that it can accelerate positive labor market contributions.


• Tristan L Botelho (Associate Professor, School of Management, Yale University)
  Kelly Shue (Amman Mineral Professor of Finance, School of Management, Yale University)
  Peer Influence in Judicial Decision-Making: Evaluations in Context
  This project aims to investigate whether individual judicial decisions (i.e., at the judge-case level) are influenced by the broader decision-making environment in which judges operate. Specifically, we aim to examine whether and how a judge’s evaluation of a case is affected by patterns in the decisions of other judges (in the same or neighboring districts) who are handling unrelated cases within the same institutional context.


• Michael Clemens (Professor, Dept. of Economics, George Mason University)
  Natalie Rigol (Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project)
  Economic Contributions of Asylum Seekers in the United States
  The US Administration is preparing to reinstate and extend restrictions on employment authorization for asylum seekers, echoing and intensifying rules adopted in 2020. Those earlier regulations were accompanied by an economic impact analysis that narrowly tallied lost wages and tax revenue from affected applicants, while omitting broader macroeconomic spillovers, detailed data on asylum seekers' skills and locations, and any empirical test of the policy’s stated goals: deterring frivolous claims and illegal entry. Rigorous scrutiny of the forthcoming 2026 rules requires independent methods to assess these claims. Yet in the United States, unlike Europe, no dataset directly identifies asylum seekers' economic characteristics. We propose a novel method to infer asylum applicant status in census microdata by constructing an Asylum Applicant Concentration Ratio using TRAC data, analogous to the Refugee Concentration Ratio developed by Evans and Fitzgerald (2017). This approach will enable the first systematic estimates of asylum seekers' employment, earnings, sectors, geographic distribution, and fiscal contributions---providing an empirical foundation for evaluating the economic consequences and behavioral effects of policy changes affecting employment by asylum-seekers.
  Publications:
  Economic and Magnet Effects of Work Authorization for Asylum Seekers: Descriptive Evidence from the United States
  


• Michael Clemens (Professor, Dept. of Economics, George Mason University)
  Economic Characteristics of Immigrants Subject to Judicial Removal Orders
  This proposal develops the first economic profile of unauthorized immigrants subject to judicial removal orders, the population directly affected by newly imposed civil monetary penalties for failure to depart. Existing evidence describes the unauthorized population as a whole, but not the removal-order-holding subpopulation whose income, assets, fiscal contributions, and ability to pay are central to legal, administrative, and Eighth Amendment proportionality analysis. The study will combine TRAC immigration court-closures data with American Community Survey microdata identifying likely unauthorized residents through standard residual-imputation methods. TRAC data will be used to estimate the removal-order population's joint distribution by age, sex, state of proceedings, and nationality. ACS observations will then be inverse-probability reweighted to match those marginals. The resulting sample will estimate earnings, poverty, formal employment, taxes, benefits, attachable-asset proxies, and fine-to-income ratios under plausible accrual horizons. The analysis will provide courts and policymakers a population-specific evidentiary basis currently unavailable.


• Kieran Douglas (MSc, Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis)
  Steve Boucher (Associate Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis)
  Ashish Shenoy (Associate Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC David)
  Immigration Enforcement, Labor Scarcity, and Mechanization in U.S. Agriculture
  Immigration enforcement is a national policy issue, but its economic effects are especially salient in U.S. agriculture, where production relies heavily on foreign-born labor. This project examines whether Secure Communities (SC), a federal interior immigration enforcement program, altered production decisions in agriculture by increasing the adoption of labor-replacing technologies, thereby offsetting the expected native wage gains from a reduced labor force. SC was a program that increased sharing of biometric data and is credited for more than 750,000 deportations throughout its staggered nation-wide rollout from 2008-2013, representing a significant negative supply shock across the country (Ambrosius & Velásquez, 2024). Combining data from the 2002, 2007, and 2012 Census of Agriculture with county-level SC rollout and enforcement data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), we estimate the impact of SC exposure intensity on farm expenditures, focusing on mechanization and labor-related productive inputs. This project informs broader debates about the impact of interior immigration enforcement on U.S agriculture.


• Eric Fish (Professor, Law School, UC Davis)
  Jailing Immigrant Witnesses
  This project concerns the practice of holding immigrants in detention in federal 8 USC 1324 prosecutions


• Callum Foote (Research Fellow, Columbia Journalism Investigations, Columbia University)
  Federal Criminal Tax Declinations and Dismissals Under the Second Trump Administration
  The second Trump administration’s DOJ dropped thousands of criminal cases in its first six months, buried among which are filed tax prosecutions that investigators built, prosecutors believed in, and grand juries endorsed — cases from an agency that wins more than nine in ten it takes to trial. This investigation will be the first to identify those dropped cases by name, using government dismissal data cross-referenced against federal court records, and document what the American public stands to lose as criminal enforcement of tax law quietly collapses.


• Isabella Kelly (MA Student, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago )
  Asylum Grant Rates During Immigration Surges: Evidence from Chicago and Boston Immigration Courts(2020–2024)
  The conventional view of adjudication in both legal theory and public understanding is unambiguous: judges are charged with maintaining impartiality when determining case outcomes. However, heightened immigration influx and growing case backlogs may introduce institutional pressures that shape decision-making. This study analyzes judge-level asylum outcomes in the Chicago and Boston Immigration Courts from 2020 to 2024 to test whether asylum grant rates shift during periods of increased immigration. The study employs a difference-in-differences design comparing changes in grant rates across the two courts around influx periods, while accounting for judge-specific tendencies and time trends. By linking institutional pressure to asylum outcomes, this project contributes to research on discretion in administrative adjudication and informs policy considerations about court resourcing, consistency across venues, and due process in the U.S. immigration system.


• Manaka Ogura (Student, Department of Economics, Yale University)
  Leah Boustan (Department of Economics, Yale University)
  Algorithmic Analysis of U.S. Asylum Processing: A Simulation Study of Queue Management Before and After COVID-19
  This project models the U.S. asylum adjudication system as a two-stage tandem queue, reflecting the sequential processing of cases through asylum officer screening and immigration judge adjudication. Using real data from TRAC EOIR reports, I calibrate a discrete-event simulation across clusters of immigration courts grouped by filing volume and grant rate, and compare system performance across two operating environments: a pre-COVID baseline calibrated to 2019 conditions and a post-COVID surge environment calibrated to 2024 conditions. The U.S. immigration court system’s asylum backlog grew from approximately 1.3 million pending cases in 2019 to over 3.6 million cases by the end of 2024, with the composition of cases, processing times, resource availability, and policy priorities changing dramatically. Cases are scheduled by judges with loosely defined priorities, creating a high-stakes queuing problem with social and economic consequences. I evaluate three scheduling algorithms — Last-In, First-Out (LIFO), First-In, First-Out (FIFO), and Priority-Based scheduling — across metrics including mean wait time, backlog accumulation, queue length over time, and system throughput. The project aims to demonstrate the applicability of queueing theory to asylum adjudication by determining which queueing algorithms perform best under normal versus crisis conditions, and to assess the economic cost of a system's failure to resolve backlog.


• Fernanda Quintanilla Dominguez (Pre-doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
  Erik Wibbels (Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)
  Drivers of Return Migration from the United States to Mexico
  Political debates over immigration in the United States assume that policies restricting access to benefits, along with deportation policies that increase perceived risk, will prompt undocumented immigrants to return to their countries of origin. However, both the effects of immigration policies and the spillover effects of deportations on voluntary return remain largely untested empirically. A small but growing literature examines return migration, though most of it focuses on refugee return or on assisted return interventions. We use data from EMIF (Migration Survey in Mexico's Northern Border), collected across all border crossings and major airports over nine years, to measure voluntary return, and exploit variation in immigration policies (IPC) and deportation rates (TRAC) across the United States to test their effects.


• Jacob N Shapiro (John Foster Dulles Professor in International Affairs and Vice Dean for Strategic Initiatives, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University)
  Deborah Pearlstein (Director, Program in Law and Public Policy and Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in Law and Public Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University)
  Mackenzie Hempe (MPA Candidate, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University)
  Sam Caplan (MPA Candidate, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University)
  Jacqueline Maguire (MPA Candidate, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University)
  Faelynn Carroll (MPA Candidate, School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University)
  Assessing Shifting Prosecutorial Trends
  The current administration has made major changes to Department of Justice priorities, resulting in new areas of focus for the Department. In response to these changing prosecutorial priorities, many career attorneys have left their positions at the DOJ. Members of the legal community have postulated that the Department has revised its prosecutorial strategy to accomplish some of the administration’s policy goals. As a result, some divisions of the Department may be understaffed while others receive injections of new resources. This combination of new priorities and changes in institutional resourcing may impact the quantity of cases filed by the Department, the kinds of charges prioritized, the quality of the cases filed, and the better understand these changes in prosecutorial behavior.



2025



• Daniel Wilson (Vice President, Research, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)
  Xiaoqing Zhou (Assistant Vice President, Research, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)
  Impacts of Recent Immigration Swings on Employment: Evidence from Local Labor Markets
  Our study examines the extent to which recent fluctuations in employment and other economic outcomes can be attributed to changes in immigrant employment, exploiting variation across local labor markets.


• Goncalo Costa (Postdoctoral Fellow, Kennedy School, Harvard University)
  Daniel Schneider (Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, Kennedy School , Harvard University)
  David Weil (Visiting Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School, Harvard University)
  Labor Standards Compliance and Worker Complaints: New Data and Insights
  Under federal and state employment laws, enforcement actions can be triggered if workers complain about perceived violations of the law. Drawing on worker surveys by the Shift Project, our research project presents new evidence on the likelihood of complaints given the prevalence of labor standards violations for workers in industries with large concentrations of low-wage workers. It examines how underlying conditions affect the likelihood of filing worker complaints to different parties inside and outside employer organizations as well as local conditions regarding the compliance behavior of other employers and the prevalence of local worker complaint activity. Fear of retaliation is among the factors affecting workers' likelihood of filing a complaint (Clibborn and Hanna-Osborne, 2003). Ways that employers may retaliate include making reports to ICE and CBP, potentially leading to deportation for the worker or their close connections. We hypothesize that in areas with higher deportation rates, workers may be less likely to report workplace violations due to increased fear, even among those not at immediate risk. This aligns with previous research (e.g., Grittner and Johnson, 2021) that illustrates the spillover effects of immigration enforcement on workplace complaint behavior. Our analysis will combine TRAC deportation data, worker survey data from the Shift Project on labor standards violations and complaint behavior, as well as local labor market condition data, including unemployment rates, industry concentration, and demographic variables. We will use regression analysis to examine how several factors, including variations in deportation intensity across geographic areas, affect complaint rates.


• Ingrid Eagly (Professor of Law, School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles)
  Steven Shafer (School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles)
  Access to Counsel in Immigration Court, Revisited
  In 2015, we published the first national study of access to counsel in U.S. immigration courts. This article revisits that project one decade later, at a critical moment when the second Trump administration seeks to begin the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.


• Patrick Gerkin (Professor, Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Legal Studies, Grand Valley State University)
  Criminal Enforcement of White Collar Crime
  This study analyzes the decline in federal white-collar crime enforcement, contrasting reduced prosecution with shifting agency capacity at the EPA and OSHA. The research will utilize TRAC data to examine the "regime of permission" and the rise of deferred prosecution agreements, with findings intended for peer-reviewed publication.


• Ivan Ivanov (Senior Economist and Economic Advisor, , Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)
  The Migrant Crisis and Municipal Bond Yields: Government Finances amid Unexpected Fiscal Shocks
  This study analyzes the decline in federal white-collar crime enforcement, contrasting reduced prosecution with shifting agency capacity at the EPA and OSHA. The research will utilize TRAC data to examine the "regime of permission" and the rise of deferred prosecution agreements, with findings intended for peer-reviewed publication.


• Sarah Lageson (Associate Professor, School of Criminology & Criminal Justice; School of Law, Northeastern University)
  Lorena Avila (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology, Villanova University)
  The Consequences of Automated Expungement Policy on Immigration Outcomes
  The proposed study aims to empirically describe a conflict of law problem that has arisen as criminal records are automatically expunged by states, making them inaccessible to immigrants who require access to their records in immigration court. This project uses public court observation, interviews and a survey with attorneys, and analysis of public immigration data to quantify the potential scope of automatic expungement in states that have passed such legislation, understand whether automatic expungement has impacted immigration outcomes in a state that implemented such legislation several years ago, and create a tangible resource for immigrants and their attorneys to understand their rights and opportunities to access their own data. Findings can directly shape state expungement policy by specifically recommending legislatively or administratively created data retention strategies or pathways to obtain expunged records, as well as impacting federal immigration policy by creating awareness amongst immigration judges and immigration courts that the loss of expunged data is at no fault of the non-citizen.


• Paul Lapinski (Ph.D. Candidae, Economics, American University)
  Expedited Justice? Assessing Procedural Reform in U.S. Asylum Courts
  Can courts be sped up without sacrificing fairness? Existing evidence in criminal and civil contexts suggests that streamlining courts can cause net positive case outcomes, but this may not generalize to other legal settings. I study the equity-efficiency tradeoff of speed in immigration court, an especially complex legal system where defendants often face language barriers and lack institutional knowledge. I analyze the Dedicated Docket (DD), a 2021 policy that mandates judges decide cases within 300 days for certain families seeking asylum in the U.S. To estimate the policy’s effects, I exploit the sudden implementation of DD and instrument DD placement with families’ U.S. entry date relative to the policy’s start date. My results will show if procedural reform generates unintended distributional consequences for a vulnerable population.


• Matthew Smoldt (Ph.D. Candidate, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University)
  Occupational Immobility and Immigration Policy Enforcement
  The crackdown on immigration under President Trump as well as its subsequent backlash raise an important question: which areas support and which oppose more severe enforcement of U.S. immigration policy? I leverage recent research to argue the intensity of enforcement rises with labor immobility. I test this thinking with regression analysis and matched samples of American county- and state-years spanning from 2002 through 2024. I expect areas with a greater prevalence of government-issued occupational licenses to deport significantly more immigrants. The findings implicate the scope of both the target population and target policies to address concerns about competition with immigrant labor.


• Hantao Wu (Ph.D. Candidate, Office of Population Research, Princeton University)
  Growing Up in Fear: Immigration Enforcement and Human Capital Accumulation
  This project, Growing Up in Fear: Immigration Enforcement and Human Capital Accumulation, examines the causal effects of immigration enforcement on the educational and economic outcomes of children in immigrant families. Using individual-level ICE arrest records from 2000 to 2020, the study will construct a national panel of enforcement activity to assess both short- and long-run impacts. In Los Angeles, the project leverages administrative student-level data from LAUSD to identify the immediate effects of arrests on academic and socio-emotional outcomes. In Texas, it employs a cohort-based difference-in-differences design using longitudinal education and labor market data to study long-term consequences. The national ICE dataset enables the construction of standardized enforcement intensity measures across all U.S. counties, supports heterogeneity analysis, and enhances external validity. The research aims to inform public understanding of how immigration policy reverberates through households, schools, and communities by providing rigorous, data-driven evidence.



2024



• Jonathan P Abel (Associate Professor, Law, UC Law SF)
  Gun Prosecutions and the Second Amendment: An Empirical Analysis
  Monumental changes in the Second Amendment have opened a range of questions about the laws that regulate guns. Increasingly, criminal prohibitions on gun possession are facing judicial scrutiny. While scholars have spent a great deal of time and energy discussing the challenges to the law, an important knowledge gap remains: How are the existing gun laws actually used in criminal practice? This project uses charging data from California, Florida, and the federal criminal system to examine the ways in which gun laws are prosecuted on the ground. What crimes are charged most often? How are these crimes interrelated with other enforcement projects, like the investigation of violent crime or drug crimes? What can we learn from this data on prosecutions that might inform our views of doctrine and policy? A survey of the landscape of gun charges will lead to a better understanding of the heated policy debate.


• Li Ai (Assistant Professor of Finance, Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics, Winthrop University)
  Yi Shirley Shen (Assistant Professor, Department of Finance, Winthrop University)
  Social Capital and Corporate Fraud
  A common definition of social capital is an environmental factor that captures the confluence of effects arising from social networks and shared common beliefs that help cooperation. Motivated by the growing research showing that social capital contributes to the economic growth of communities and enhances the performance of local and national governments, we aim to examine the effect of social capital on corporate fraud in the United States.


• Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes (Professor, Economics and Business Management/School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts , University of California Merced)
  Rodrigo Carillo Valles (Department Chairperson/Professor, Economics and Business Management, University of California Merced)
  Assessing the Impact of Title 42 on Border Patrol Dispositions and Migrant Profiles
  Title 42, a public health order activated during the COVID-19 pandemic, has significantly impacted U.S. immigration enforcement. This project aims to analyze how Title 42 influenced Border Patrol (BP) dispositions, with a focus on disposition outcomes based on migrant characteristics.


• Andrew Baker (Assistant Professor, Law, Berkeley)
  Kyle Rozema (Professor of Law and Co-Director of the JD/PhD Program and Academic Placement, Pritzker School of Law, Northwestern University)
  Adam Chilton (Howard G. Krane Professor of Law, Walter Mander Research Scholar, Law School, University of Chicago)
  The Revolving Door and Federal Prosecutors
  For my paper proposal I plan to analyze whether there is an empirical relation between the revolving door practice at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and prosecutorial rigor. In particular, I will analyze whether the distribution of proxies for case strictness (contemporaneous abnormal returns, news and tone analysis, and search trends) correlates with whether a line attorney at the DOJ is a “revolver”, and with how many years are left until the DOJ attorney returns to private practice. This is an important question; there is large scale public distrust in our governmental institutions, and studies of regulatory capture are important for understanding the machinations of our government. I believe this project has the potential to shed some light on a topic that has hitherto been discussed in general terms without empirical support.


• Mr Linus Chan (Clinical Professor of Law, Law School, University of Minnesota)
  Rebecca Scholtz (Adjunct Professor, Law School, University of Minnesota)
  ICE initiated Appeals and their impacts and a demographic study of those held in ICE detention in Minnesota and potentially released on OSUP
  We are hoping to examine the impact of ICE initiated appeals on the overall system in an effort to advocate for their restriction or abolition. We are also examining the demographics of people held in Minnesota ICE detention and those who were likely ordered removed but later granted OSUP, either through a withholding of removal grant, CAT grant, or the inability to get travel documents (as would be the case for many of the Hmong living in the Twin Cities).


• Sophia Costa (Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago)
  An Examination of Disparities in United States Immigration Courts� Bond Hearing Decisions
  While the body of knowledge on �crimmigration��the overlap between criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems�has expanded over the past decades, little is known about one aspect of �crimmigration��bond hearings decisions in immigration courts. One branch of the existing research on this subject has centered on immigration judges� decisions. Another body of work discusses factors that shape bond decisions beyond the choices of individual judges. Yet, many other factors that may impact judicial decisions about immigration bonds remain underexplored. Thus, to explore other forces that may shape immigration bond decisions, my project will use data from TRAC�s �Immigration Court Bond Hearings and Related Case Decisions� dataset and the Judge Information Center. I plan to conduct a multivariate analysis that centers on how bond granting rates and bond amounts granted may be influenced by (1) the state where the court is located; (2) the applicant�s national origin group; and (3) the judge who made the decision. The analysis will result in a scholarly article that I will publish in peer-reviewed journals and present at academic conferences.


• Evgeniya A Duzhak (Regional Economist, Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco)
  Stephanie Stewart (Research Associate, Economic Research, Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco)
  Accounting for recent spike in immigration
  The Congressional Budget Office recently raised its demographic projections for net U.S. immigration. Most of the increase in the projections came from undocumented immigrants. Updating the CBO estimates with recent data points shows a continuing strong inflow of undocumented migrants. Analysis linking the revised estimates for this group to labor market statistics shows that immigrants joining the workforce are likely to have modestly eased labor market tightness.


• Elizabeth Mitchell Elder (Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
  Aaron Kaufman (Assistant Professor, Political Science, New York University Abu Dhabi)
  Public Corruption and Descriptive Representation
  We propose a research project to study how descriptively representative are public officials accused of corruption in the US compared to the universe of all elected officials. Using TRAC data (Cordis and Milyo 2016), we will identify the set of public corruption prosecutions and match them to individuals using two approaches: an automated approach based on a webdriver, and a manual approach using teams of trained research assistants. With this data we hope to answer questions related to the demographic makeup of officials charged with corruption as compared to the population of elected officials (Warshaw, de Benedictis-Kessner, and Velez 2022). First, do politicians accused of corruption look like the universe of politicians on demographic dimensions like race, gender, wealth, and background? Second, conditional on getting charged with corruption, what demographic variables predict more severe sentences?


• Elizabeth Mitchell Elder (Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
  Perceived and Actual Corruption
  In a time in which Americans increasingly mistrust their governments, corruption among public officials is a matter of growing public concern. But research from outside the United States suggests that citizens’ perceptions of corruption are often divorced from true levels of misconduct among public officials. To understand whether acts of corruption are contributing to growing mistrust in government, it is necessary to first know whether people are actually aware of corruption happening around them. This project seeks to understand how cases of official corruption are related to public perceptions of corruption. To do this, I will compare corruption cases pursued by federal prosecutors in a person’s locality to their beliefs about the amount and kinds of corruption that are present in their area. This will shed light on the processes that translate public corruption into the public consciousness.


• Dr. Rebecca Galemba (Associate Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver)
  Lisa Martinez (Professor, Sociology & Criminology, University of Denver)
  Laura Lunn (Adjunct Professor, College of Law, University of Denver)
  Elizabeth Jordan (Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, College of Law, University of Denver)
  Christina Brown (Special Community Member and Immigration Attorney, Colorado Asylum Center, University of Denver)
  Expediting Expulsion:: Fast-Tracking the Deportation of Families through the Immigration Court System
  This project uses a multimethod study to examine the impact of expedited processing of asylum procedures in immigration courts in Denver and three other U.S. cities. The two mechanisms we seek to understand in relation to regular asylum timelines included the dedicated docket and the Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) Program, expedited procedures implemented during the Biden administration to promote efficiency in asylum proceedings. Since their implementation, advocates have raised concerns including lack of access to representation, errors, and high denial rates (AILA 2022). Our study will assess how fast-track procedures compare to regular asylum timelines to capture similarities and differences between current expedited procedures and earlier precedents. Specifically, we seek to document whether the dedicated docket produces higher denial rates than regular dockets, how migrants are treated in the courtroom on expedited versus regular timelines, if certain nationalities are disproportionately targeted, and whether there is a continuity with past expedited policies targeting family units.


• Jessica Kiser (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, Vanderbilt University)
  Home births and Health Outcomes
  The research will seek to understand how the threat of disruptions to families like Secure Community (SC) removals changes birthing decisions. It will also aim to determine the effects of such changes on childbearing and maternal and infant health.


• Margot Moinester (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis)
  Ethnoracial Disparities in Deportation Rates from the U.S. Interior
  This project combines analysis of immigration enforcement records with census data to examine drivers of ethnoracial disparities in deportation rates from the U.S. interior over the past twenty-five years.


• Ella M Napier (J.D., College of Law, Georgia State University)
  Daniel Quiggin (Academic Professional (Data Analytics), College of Law, Georgia State University)
  Judicial Decision-making in the U.S. Immigration Courts: A Statistical Analysis of Interplay Between Judge and Respondent-Specific Factors
  This paper uses various statistical analysis methods to examine what factors weigh on judicial decision-making in the U.S. Immigration Courts. The objective is to determine what factors about judges, and indeed, what factors about respondents, make case outcomes more or less likely.


• Thomas Pearson (Assistant Professor, Economics/Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University)
  Brenda Teruya (Co-Instructor, Economics/Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University)
  Effects of Transmit Migration on Mexican Communities
  This project seeks to explore the effects of transit migration on Mexican communities. We are interested in various outcomes including how migration impacts: 1.) local labor markets (e.g., wages, employment, occupational choice), 2.) crime (e.g., crime rates, cartel activity, and reporting), 3.) economic activity (e.g., firm creation/survival and investment) 4.) politics (e.g., political attitudes towards migration and vote shares for various political parties).


• Thomas Pearson (Assistant Professor, Economics/Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University)
  Deportations and Migrants� Origin Cities: Evidence from the Removal of Mexican Migrants from the U.S
  This project aims to evaluate the quality of recent TRAC data, which includes information on the origin states and cities of Mexican deportees. Validating this information will allow us to determine whether these data can enhance our understanding of the impacts of immigration enforcement at origin. It may also help in assessing the role of various push (e.g., violence, crime, droughts) and pull factors (e.g., higher wages, political stability) in driving undocumented migration to the U.S.


• Matthew Tarizzo (Ph. D. Candidate, Sociology Department, Vanderbilt University)
  Context of Reception and High School Completion among Second Generation Hispanic Youth
  Studies on immigrant incorporation tend to exclusively focus on first-generation immigrants. Additionally, the context of reception immigrant’s experience their incorporation within has typically been dichotomized in prior research as either a traditional migrant gateway or as a newly emerging migrant destination. Using data from the 2021 ACS, this paper expands on both concepts of mobility and context by focusing on second-generation Hispanic youth’s high school completion rates, compared to delayed completion or discontinued schooling, and their educational mobility trajectories, relative to their immigrant parents across various contextual factors. Contextual factors of interest include minimum wage, unemployment rates, income per capita, fair-market rent, state spending on education per pupil, and proportion of the population in the immigrant community. Results show the importance of individual-level factors such as gender, English proficiency, and becoming a parent on educational attainment and mobility. More importantly, two contextual variables of overarching importance, the proportion of the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) population in the immigrant community and state spending on education per pupil, were both consistently significant predictors of high school completion and upward educational mobility. I argue for adding the educational system to the conceptualization of contexts of reception and advocate for continued advancement in operationalizing context of reception in more nuanced ways beyond the dichotomy relied on in prior research.


• Mr. George J Vojta (JD / PhD Student, Law School and Economics Department, The University of Chicago)
  ATTORNEY-CASE MATCHING HOW THE MARKET FOR LAWYERS IMPACTS OUTCOMES
  This paper proposes a model for attorney-case matching in the style of a matching-with-contracts-with-outcomes framework. The process in which legal clients and lawyers pair up together remains a lacuna in the fields of both law and economics. The purpose of this proposal is to fill this gap by leveraging TRAC dataset of immigration law. During the descriptive analysis of this setting, I seek to show that in immigration cases lawyers respond deferentially to different cases, both between and within case type. Specifically, I seek to show that those with privilege (e.g. high socioeconomic status, or from preferred countries) tend to get more and better offers for representation. With the model in hand, I simulate different attorney-client economies to demonstrate three key takeaways: First, perhaps unsurprisingly, if lawyers exhibit taste-based preferences towards a privileged group, the group performs better in the court of law due to average differences in representation ability. Second, when a group is disadvantaged in court, but lawyers do not show group-based preferences, the two groups still see a separation in the ability of lawyers that represent them. This result is a consequence of the modeling assumption that lawyers care about winning cases. Third and finally, because this separation exists, discrimination in the courthouse leads to disparities in representation, exacerbating the differences in outcomes across the two groups. These findings have important implications for the legal sector, as they show how the market for representation increases inequalities in courtroom outcomes. This suggests disconcerting truths about equality and justice for those making their way through the legal system.


• Emeline F Wright (Undergraduate Student, General College, University of Chicago)
  “‘Safe, Humane and Orderly Migration’: an Evaluation of the Biden Administration’s Use of Humanitarian Parole as an Immigration Tool”
  This research examines the Biden administration’s use of humanitarian parole as a facet of its immigration policy. I seek to evaluate the use of humanitarian parole according to the metrics set out by the Biden administration, including 1) the deterrence of unauthorized entry into the US 2) the redirecting of the flow of legal entrants from the SWB to internal POEs 3) the creation of a “safe” and “humane” means of migration into the US and 4) the creation of a meaningful alternative option to both unauthorized migration and current humanitarian pathways.



2023



• Jonathan Philip Abel (Associate Professor, Law School, UC Law, San Francisco)
  Felons, Firearms, and Federalization: The View from State Court
  Scholars and litigants have long discussed the "federalization" of crime. At the center of so many normative and descriptive claims is an assumption about how the federal system compares to the state system in processing cases. Too often, however, the literature's federal-to-state comparisons are made without benefit of state data. In short, no one is able to account for the cases that could "go federal," but don't. I attempt to surface these counterfactual cases through a case study of a single county in a single year. This study allowed me examine all the federal felon-in-possession prosecutions alongside all of the state felon-in-possession prosecutions that stayed in state court. Using this novel dataset, I identify and contemplate several distortions in our existing understanding of how federalization operates. Further, I use the case study to consider the larger "federal fixation" that afflicts academic research: a focus on the federal at the expense of state and local courts.


• Robert Adelman (Department Chair and Professor, Sociology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
  Isabel Anadon (Assistant Professor, Sociology, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
  Shiyue Cui (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, University of California, San Francisco and University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
  Yulin Yang (Postdoctoral Researcher, Sociology, University of California, San Francisco and University at Buffalo, The State University of New York)
  Analyzing the U.S. Immigration Legal System: A Comprehensive Study of Judicial Processes and Outcomes
  Decisions made in the U.S. deportation and immigration legal systems are felt by millions of individuals, families, and communities. In this research proposal, we aim to comprehensively analyze judicial processes and outcomes in the U.S. deportation system. This research program is driven by the need to better understand the socio-legal aspects of deportation, the decision-making processes of immigration judges, and the impact of various socio-economic and political factors on these decisions. In addition to the judicial activities from immigration courts, we will also investigate the role and activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and their socio-legal consequences. Levels of analysis include, but are not limited to, the individual, county, and state.


• Hannah Smith Antinozzi (Assistant Professor, Crews School of Accountancy, University of Memphis)
  An Analysis of Who Commits Tax Fraud
  Tax fraud is an understudied area of the fraud accounting literature. Tax fraud is unique to other types of fraud in that all firms and individuals must pay tax and all firms and individuals are incentivized to pay the least amount of tax possible. In this study we analyze using statistical analyses who commits tax fraud – individuals and firms. And then we create a prediction model using these characteristics and outcomes to determine whether tax fraud can be predicted prior to tax fraud cases coming to court.


• Asad L Asad (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Stanford University)
  The Spillover Effects of National Events on U.S. Latinos’ Psychological Distress, 2011-2018
  Congress last enacted comprehensive immigration reform in the mid-1980s, granting over two million noncitizens a pathway to citizenship. Almost four decades later, millions of noncitizens and their U.S. citizen families, most of whom are of Latino descent, await similar relief. Absent congressional reform, different presidential administrations have granted or denied some noncitizens temporary protection from deportation—actions that themselves have faced regular challenges in federal court. We conceptualize these actions as dramatic societal events that have spillover consequences on Latinos across citizenship statuses. Drawing on eight years of public- and restricted-access data from the National Health Interview Survey (2011-2018), this article examines whether and how six dramatic societal events impact psychological distress among Latinos who are U.S.-born citizens, naturalized citizens, and noncitizens.


• Dr. Nana Afua Brantuo (Founder, Diaspora Praxis LLC , N/A, N/A)
  Miranda Cady Hallett (Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dayton)
  Bound by Bias: Examining Anti-Black Racism in the Cleveland Immigration Court
  "Bound by Bias: Examining Anti-Black Racism in the Cleveland Immigration Court" is a mixed-methods research project that investigates systemic biases faced by Black immigrants in the US immigration court system, with a focus on the Cleveland Immigration Court. This study utilizes interdisciplinary literature, TRAC data, public sector data, and interviews with immigration attorneys and Black migrants who have experienced asylum decisions or deportations. The research uncovers how anti-Black racism manifests in immigration law and practice, shedding light on the administrative, legal, and systemic challenges Black immigrants encounter. By analyzing TRAC data, the study highlights disparities in bond denial rates, representation rates, case processing times, and geographic distribution for migrants from African and African Diaspora nations. The project aims to address these systemic issues by providing empirical evidence and insights. It seeks to inform policy discussions and advocate for equitable immigration practices, regardless of an individual's race or ethnicity, within the US immigration court system.


• Ryan Cummings (Chief of Staff, Institute of Economic Policy Research , Stanford University)
  Abigail Lucia Sanchez (Director, Institute of Economic Policy Research, Stanford University)
  Quantifying Labor Elasticity in Response to Deportation Raids in California
  This research examines the relationship between deportation raids and employment patterns in California, with two primary goals. First, we aim to quantify how employment levels respond to increased removals and arrests by calculating labor elasticity using comprehensive tax and employment records. Second, we seek to determine whether ICE immigration raids tend to occur in areas with lower labor elasticities.


• Stephanie H Didwania (Associate Professor, Pritzker School of Law, Northwestern University)
  The Role of Political Preferences in Prosecutorial Decision-Making
  This project will seek to examine individual political preferences affect decision-making by (un-elected) prosecutors. I plan to construct a measure of each AUSA's political views derived from publicly-available campaign contribution records and examine the ways in which prosecutors' (inferred) political views seem to influence the decisions that they make in criminal cases.


• Dr. Chiara Galli (Assistant Professor , Comparative Human Development Department, University of Chicago)
  Tatiana Padilla (Ph.D. Candidate, School of Public Policy, Cornell)
  Case Outcomes and Access to Counsel for Unaccompanied Minors in U.S. Removal Proceedings: Changes During Obama, Trump, and Biden.
  This research examines the �justice gap��the difference between the number of people experiencing problems that could benefit from legal assistance and those who receive it �for unaccompanied immigrant children in US deportation proceedings, asking three inter-related questions: (1) In the context of limited supply of legal services, what are the determinants of access to legal representation among unaccompanied children in US immigration court? (2) What is the impact of legal representation for the outcomes of unaccompanied children�s applications for deportation relief as immigration policies have evolved under the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations? (3)Do unaccompanied children fare better or worse than adults on the study outcomes of access to counsel and deportation case outcomes?
  Publications:
  Deporting children: case outcomes for unaccompanied minors facing removal proceedings in US immigration court
  The Justice Gap for Unaccompanied Children in US Immigration Court: Rurality, Resources, and Client Characteristics as Determinants of Access to Counsel
  


• Allison P Harris (Assistant Professor, Political Science, Yale University)
  Maya Sen (Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
  Public Defender Experience and Case Outcomes
  Do judges’ professional backgrounds affect their rulings? We investigate this question by looking at the impact of judges’ public defender experience on sentencing. Leveraging thousands of sentences, we find that defendants assigned to a former public defender are, on average, less likely to be incarcerated. Their sentences are also sometimes shorter, which we show is partially due to former public defenders being less likely to give extreme punishments. Taken together, this means that even small increases in the number of former public defenders can result in thousands fewer people incarcerated. The findings make two key contributions. First, our findings provide crucial insight into disparities in the criminal legal system and how judge characteristics can play a significant role. Second, we showcase the potential impact of judges’ professional experience on decision-making. Both illustrate a new strategy through which politicians can influence policy—by choosing judges based on their previous jobs.


• Allison Harris (Assistant Professor, Political Science, Yale University)
  Racial Diversity among Judges and Sentencing Decisions
  This project seeks to identify the relationship between racial diversity among judges and sentencing decisions in federal trial courts. In previous analyses of state court data, I find that as Black judges gain representation on the bench, courts becomes less punitive, overall, and especially in their sentencing of Black defendants. This shift in sentencing behavior is largely driven by White judges' responses to gaining more Black colleagues. This project seeks to identify whether similar relationships exist between racial diversity among judges and sentencing in federal district courts.


• Jeremy Horowitz (Senior Research Scientist, International Programs, NORC at the University of Chicago)
  Angelo Cozzubo (Principal Research Analyst, School of Public Policy, NORC at the University of Chicago)
  Democratic Backsliding and Migration
  This project examines whether there is a link between democratic backsliding and migration, measured using Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data on irregular entry to the United States.


• Aaron Russell Kaufman (Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science, Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi)
  Is There Racial Bias in Corruption Prosecutions?
  We propose a research project to study the relationship between race, investigative discretion, and electoral outcomes in the US. This study has three components: (1) an observational design to measure racial disparities in corruption investigations, prosecutions, convictions, and sentences; (2) a conjoint experiment to study the relationship between race and voters' perceptions of corruption; and (3) a natural experimental design to causally identify whether racial disparities in corruption perceptions affect turnout and vote choice.


• Amanda R. Kreider (Postdoctoral Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania)
  Rachel M Werner (M.D., Ph.D., Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania)
  The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on the Labor Supply of Home Care Workers
  Home health aides and personal care aides are among the fastest-growing occupations in the United States, but there are growing concerns about shortages of these workers. Given the home care industry’s heavy reliance on immigrant workers, it is important to understand the consequences of the nation’s escalating immigration enforcement over the last several decades on home care worker supply. Moreover, if immigration enforcement reduces the size of this labor force, it is critical to understand how this reduction impacts the people who rely on home care services and their caregivers. We will examine the effects of a federal enforcement policy, Secure Communities (SC), which was rolled out on a quasi-random basis at the county level between 2008-2013, on: (1) the size of the home care workforce, (2) receipt (and provision) of formal and informal caregiving, and (3) the likelihood of older adults moving to a nursing home or coresiding with their children.


• Margot Moinester (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis)
  Ariela Schachter (Associate Professor, Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis)
  Contextual Factors Shaping Deportation Fears in the United States
  Scholarship shows that immigrants and their families have been living under a cloud of fear that they or a loved one could suddenly be deported. Yet we have a limited understanding of the factors shaping these fears beyond individual legal precarity. This study seeks to understand contextual factors shaping Latine individuals’ fears of deportation over time.
  Publications:
  The Control Boom: US Interior Immigration Enforcement, 1971–2010
  


• Steven Muzatko (Associate Professor and H.B. Foster Bowdon Endowed Chair of Accounting, Accounting / Neil Griffin College of Business, Arkansas State University - State University, AR)
  Adriana Cordis (Professor of Accounting, Department of Accounting, Winthrop University)
  An Analysis of the Causes and Consequences of U.S. White Collar Crime
  We plan to conduct a taxonomic analysis of white-collar crime in the United States. Our emphasis will be on providing insights into the political and institutional determinants of fraud and the public policy implications of reducing the prevalence of fraud. The project is motivated in part by research that shows that both political alignment and public corruption are positively correlated with various measures of earnings management. Although earnings management is not fraud per se, it rises to the level of fraud if a company intentionally provides materially misstated information. By examining the impact of political and institutional determinants on the number of fraud convictions, our analysis will contribute to the understanding of the determinants of fraud and help policy-makers and professionals develop better fraud detection models.


• Sandra Orozco Aleman (Associate Professor , Finance and Economics Department, Mississippi State University)
  Heriberto Gonzales Lozano (Associate Clinical Professor, Finance and Economics Department, Mississippi State University)
  Kendall J Kennedy (Assistant Professor, Finance and Economics Department, Mississippi State University)
  Effects of Immigration Enforcement on Mobility and Avoidance Behavior
  We analyze the effects of immigration policies, particularly those between federal immigration enforcement and local law enforcement, on mobility and law enforcement avoidance behavior, particularly among Hispanics more likely to be affected by immigration enforcement policies.


• Caitlin Patler (Associate Professor , Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley)
  Erin Hamilton (Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis)
  Sam Fuller (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis)
  Konrad Franco (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis)
  Paola D. Langer (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis)
  Immigration Law Enforcement and Community Wellbeing
  We analyze: 1) when and where US immigration law enforcement occurs; 2) what factors predict changes in, or differences in the application of, US immigration law enforcement; and 3) how immigration law enforcement may influence community wellbeing.


• Thomas Pearson (Assistant Professor, Economic/Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University)
  U.S. Immigration Enforcement and Mexican Labor Markets
  Today, nearly 10% of Mexican-born individuals—11 million people—live in the United States. Such large migrant populations have increased Mexico’s exposure to shocks across the border. Important among these has been the growing intensity of interior immigration enforcement and deportations, which have increased return flows to Mexico. This project studies how these deportations from the U.S. impact Mexican labor markets. To do this, I exploit the variation across the U.S. over time in the application of Secure Communities (SC), a policy which expanded local immigration enforcement. This variation, along with variation in Mexican migrant networks, provides quasi-random exposure to U.S. deportations. In the current working paper, I show that deportations increase return migration to Mexico, which increases labor market competition and decreases earnings for workers in Mexico.
  Publications:
  The impact of immigration status on crime reporting: Evidence from DACA
  


• Danielle Puretz (Ph.D. Candidate, Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine)
  Local Borders and Boundaries: The Influence of Local Policies in Immigration Outcomes
  In the US immigration law falls under federal jurisdiction, but scholars have shown that immigrants’ experiences are increasingly determined at local levels. Cities, counties, and states have the power to champion policy initiatives including proactively cooperating with ICE, limiting access to resources, participating in initiatives to welcome immigrants, and providing resources such as legal defense. These policies are within local control and work to cushion against or compound the impact of federal practices. But how much impact do these policies really have? This research focuses on immigration outcomes across space—with special attention to "local" borders—and aims to identify how welcoming/restrictive and cooperation/non-cooperation policies impact immigration outcomes including ICE detainers, removals, and court backlogs.


• Hailey Salmonsen (Student, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University)
  Emily Thorson (Assistant Professor, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University)
  Remote Adjudication and its Impact on Detained Immigrants
  The United States immigration courts are responsible for deciding whether immigrants suspected of being in the country unlawfully should be deported. There are almost two million of these deportation cases currently pending in the immigration court system, often referred to as the immigration court backlog. The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency that oversees the court, has made attempts to reduce this backlog through the use of video teleconferencing (VTC) and the creation of Immigration Adjudication Centers (IAC) which almost exclusively rely on VTC to conduct hearings from across the country. This largely impacts detained immigrants as their cases are most often moved to VTC instead of in person proceedings. Detained immigrants already have a more difficult time obtaining legal counsel. This push to VTC raises the question: how have attempts made by EOIR to reduce back loaded immigration cases using VTC impacted the nature of detained cases and their outcomes? To answer this, I analyze data tracking the characteristics and outcomes of cases that are heard via VTC versus in-person.


• Taryn Isabel Sebba (Student, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University)
  Stanley N. Katz (Lecturer and Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University)
  Understanding the Impacts of Indefinite Detention Policies on Migration Case Outcomes
  This project seeks to fulfill Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs’ thesis requirement through a mixed methods analysis of detention policies and immigration outcomes in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In providing a historical overview and statistical analysis using TRAC data, this project seeks to understand how detention impacts immigration outcomes. More specifically, this project seeks to understand how the supposedly administrative process of detention can have adverse impacts on whether a migrant’s immigration case results in release or deportation proceedings. If this relationship is established, then policy recommendations will be formed in an effort to reform these practices and restore due process rights in immigration proceedings.


• Winnie van Dijk (Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Yale University)
  Zachary Bleemer (Department of Economics, Princeton University)
  A comparison of lawyers and non-lawyers in U.S. immigration courts
  Both lawyers and non-lawyers (e.g., accredited legal representatives) are allowed to represent clients and provide legal advice in immigration court cases. Lawyers and non-lawyers may be differentially effective in achieving their clients’ objectives, and they may also differ in terms of the cost of their labor and their availability. We are interested in comparing the performance of lawyers versus non-lawyers in immigration cases, as measured by court case outcomes and duration. By non-lawyers, we mean anyone who would not tick the box “I am an attorney eligible to practice law in, and a member in good standing of, the bar of the highest court(s) of the following states(s), possession(s), territory(ies), commonwealth(s), or the District of Columbia (use additional space on reverse side if necessary), and I am not subject to any order disbarring, suspending, enjoining, restraining or otherwise restricting me in the practice of law in any jurisdiction (if subject to such an order, do not check this box and explain on reverse)” on form OMB#1125-0006 Notice of Entry of Appearance as Attorney or Representative Before the Immigration Court. We believe that this information is recorded in the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) data. We plan to run regressions of court outcomes on an indicator specifying whether the defendant had a lawyer, a non-lawyer, or no representative. We also plan to run regressions where we split the indicator on the right-hand side out into the five subgroups included in “non-lawyer”, as specified on form OMB#1125-0006 Notice of Entry of Appearance as Attorney or Representative Before the Immigration Court, so as to study whether there are any differences in court outcomes by subgroup.


• Hannah Walker (Assistant professor, Government, University of Texas at Austin)
  Collaborative Injustice: Linking Local Policing to Federal Crimmigration
  Although they account for 16 percent of the U.S. population, Latinx people account for over 30 percent of the federally incarcerated, itself a significant increase from prior decades. Scholars identify collaborative programs that conscript local criminal justice infrastructure to implement federal immigration policy as the central force driving both the dramatic rise in deportations in the mid-2010s, and the steeply ascending presence of Latinx people in federal prisons. Yet, the exact mechanisms by which these collaborative programs uniquely and broadly impact Latinx people, beyond citizenship status, and facilitate their heightened criminal legal contact are not well understood. Crucially, case studies of a handful of localities demonstrate that such programs are an effective way of funneling people without appropriate documentation into immigration proceedings, but the key racial mechanism is the quotidian practices already employed by local police, which are themselves weighted with ethno-racial and class biases. Yet, data limitations have inhibited a full, systematic explication of these dynamics. This project leverages more precise theory and several data sources to address this gap.


• Reem Zaiour (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, UC Davis)
  Political campaigning, asylum applications, and judges' decisions
  In this research project, I examine the impact of political campaigns, led by parties with varying political leanings, on both the characteristics of migrants seeking asylum in the US and the decisions made by judges on their asylum applications.



2022



• Esther Arenas-Arroyo (Dr., Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business)
  Catalina Amuedo Dorantes (Professor, Economics and Business Management, University of California, Merced)
  Understanding Changes in Judicial Careers and their Impact on Sentencing
  Our main goal is to study career choices made by judges who have served on federal district and circuit courts. Using data on the universe of federal judges and their assigned cases over the past twenty years, we aim to gain a better understanding of how federal judges’ careers have evolved, paying close attention to the implications of new developments in their observed trajectories on the judiciary, sentencing, and society.


• Asad L Asad (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Stanford University)
  Livea Baer-Bositis (Assistant Professor, Political Science, Horton Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire)
  Surveillance and system avoidance among Latino immigrants in the United States
  Research on surveillance and system avoidance predicts that individuals worried about state punishment are likely to avoid institutions that keep formal records. Much of this work is set in the context of the criminal-legal system, with scholars arguing that dynamics of surveillance and system avoidance likely extend to immigrants vulnerable to deportation as well. Yet, little work has tested this idea using national data on immigrants and their families. This project examines the relationship between immigration enforcement and Latino immigrants’ system avoidance across the United States by linking data on immigration enforcement to national data on Latino immigrants’ institutional involvement. This research will broaden our understanding of the connection between surveillance, immigration enforcement, and system avoidance, including the costs and consequences of punishment for immigrants and their families in daily life.


• Cynthia Bansak (Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics, Economics, St. Lawrence University)
  The Impact of Secure Communities on the Labor Market Outcomes of Immigrant Women Left Behind
  We investigate the impact of removals under the Secure Communities (SC) program on the labor market outcomes of immigrant women remaining in the U.S. Under SC, immigration enforcement increased dramatically, deportations rose and fear became widespread. In response, there may have been a chilling effect pushing immigrant women out of the labor market. However, increased financial need for immigrant women whose spouses were deported and for those who feared such a likelihood could have pushed these individuals into the labor market. The size of the responses likely depended on the intensity of the program, which, we document, varied by country of origin and location. As a result, analysis at the aggregate level may mask differential responses. We investigate these differences using labor force data from the ACS and data on individual level deportations from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the latter of which allows us to measure immigration enforcement by country of origin and MSA. This enforcement measure differs from others who mostly use the staggered rollout dates of SC to capture the variation in intensity. Using these data we estimate a first difference model at the country of origin- MSA level. Specifically, we examine changes from the period before SC was in place (2005-2007) to the period after it ended (2015-2017) as a function of the accumulated deportations during the time of the program (2008-2014). This model allows us to control for country of origin and MSA fixed effects, the latter of which will account for differential enforcement due to how long SC was in place and the extent to which local law enforcement participated by arresting individuals or complying with ICE requests to detain them. Our model estimates a longer-term response to the program, instead of an annual one, and we argue this is preferable as it likely takes time for individuals to learn about an increase in deportations and subsequently change their behavior. We find preliminary evidence of increased employment and decreased hours worked for those most likely to have financial need - those with a high school degree or less and living in areas with heightened deportation risk. This may be a story of vulnerable women moving into more informal work, which is less visible to law enforcement, more flexible, but also less stable. Thus, the increased enforcement appears to have increased the necessity for some women left behind to engage in the labor market, despite fears that they themselves will be deported. We also find suggestive evidence of heterogeneous responses which shed light on the channels through which SC had an impact. In particular, we find the negative hours response holds for those whose spouses are present but not for those who are absent, while the increase in housework and child care is concentrated among non-citizens.
  Publications:
  The impact of Secure Communities on the labor market outcomes of immigrant women
  


• Cynthia Bansak (Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, St. Lawrence University)
  Chad Sparber (W. Bradford Wiley Chair in Economics, Department of Economics, Colgate University)
  Sarah Pearlman (Associate Professor and Chair of Economics, Department of Economics, Vassar College)
  The Impact of Secure Communities on the Labor Market Outcomes of Immigrant Women Left Behind
  We investigate the impact of removals under the Secure Communities (SC) program on the labor market outcomes of immigrant women remaining in the U.S. Under SC, immigration enforcement increased dramatically, deportations rose and fear became widespread. In response, there may have been a chilling effect pushing immigrant women out of the labor market. However, increased financial need for immigrant women whose spouses were deported and for those who feared such a likelihood could have pushed these individuals into the labor market. The size of the responses likely depended on the intensity of the program, which, we document, varied by country of origin and location. As a result, analysis at the aggregate level may mask differential responses. We investigate these differences using labor force data from the ACS and data on individual level deportations from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the latter of which allows us to measure immigration enforcement by country of origin and MSA. This enforcement measure differs from others who mostly use the staggered rollout dates of SC to capture the variation in intensity. Using these data we estimate a first difference model at the country of origin- MSA level. Specifically, we examine changes from the period before SC was in place (2005-2007) to the period after it ended (2015-2017) as a function of the accumulated deportations during the time of the program (2008-2014). This model allows us to control for country of origin and MSA fixed effects, the latter of which will account for differential enforcement due to how long SC was in place and the extent to which local law enforcement participated by arresting individuals or complying with ICE requests to detain them. Our model estimates a longer-term response to the program, instead of an annual one, and we argue this is preferable as it likely takes time for individuals to learn about an increase in deportations and subsequently change their behavior. We find preliminary evidence of increased employment and decreased hours worked for those most likely to have financial need - those with a high school degree or less and living in areas with heightened deportation risk. This may be a story of vulnerable women moving into more informal work, which is less visible to law enforcement, more flexible, but also less stable. Thus, the increased enforcement appears to have increased the necessity for some women left behind to engage in the labor market, despite fears that they themselves will be deported. We also find suggestive evidence of heterogeneous responses which shed light on the channels through which SC had an impact. In particular, we find the negative hours response holds for those whose spouses are present but not for those who are absent, while the increase in housework and child care is concentrated among non-citizens.


• Cynthia Bansak (Professor of Economics, Economics, St. Lawrence University)
  Michael Coon (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Tampa)
  Abigail Hall Blanco (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Tampa)
  The Impact of Arrest, Detention, and Deportations on Public Assistance Usage
  We investigate the impact of immigration enforcement on public assistance usage. In particular, we assess the impact of multiple enforcement mechanisms, such as arrests, detentions, and deportations that arise from programs such as Secure Communities, 287g, ICE internal arrest efforts, and the Criminal Alien Program over the past two decades. Using TRAC data at the county-state level and micro data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the American Community Survey, we test empirically the causal impact on take up of various government assistance programs. The ex-ante empirical predictions are ambiguous. On the one hand, usage could go up if a main income earner is deported leaving family member without a regular income source. On the other hand, usage could fall if there is increased fear of deportation and there is a chilling effect among eligible household members.
  Publications:
  The impact of Secure Communities on the labor market outcomes of immigrant women
  


• Francisco A. Castellanos-Sosa (Ph.D. Candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin)
  Immigration and Income Inequality in the United States
  This paper estimates the effects of Secure Communities (SC), a federal immigration enforcement program, on the wage and wage distribution of U.S.-born male workers across education groups. SC’s staggered and geographically quasi-random implementation allows exploiting such variations under a difference-in-difference approach. Results suggest it had a positive effect on traditional measures of income inequality, and no overall effect on the mean of male wages. A wage-decile and education-group analysis explain the origin of the inequality increase. SC reduced male wages by about 2% in the lowest two deciles. The effect goes beyond 4% for those with a high school degree or less. Results vanish for higher education groups and at higher deciles. These results suggest that those who were deported by SC complemented U.S.-born male workers with low education and had wages at the bottom of the distribution.


• Prof Michael Clemens (Faculty Affiliate (currently); Full Professor (January 10, 2023), Dept. of Economics, George Mason University)
  The effect of lawful migration channels on irregular migration pressure: Evidence from US border apprehensions 2011–2022
  I am currently preparing a paper on the effects of lawful migration channels on migrants' decisions about irregular migration. This is an area of pressing policy importance, and extensive qualitative evidence, but little quantitative evidence. I hope to use TRAC's data on dispositions of border encounters to conduct a quantitative study of the hypothesis that CBP disposition policy affects later attempts at irregular migration. My principal hypothesis is that increased channels for lawful migration *deter*, rather than encourage, future attempts at irregular entry.
  Publications:
  The effect of lawful crossing on unlawful crossing at the US southwest border
  


• Ingrid Eagly (Professor of Law, School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles)
  Steven Schafer (Affiliated Researcher, School of Law, Empirical Legal Research Group, University of California, Los Angeles)
  The Detained Docket
  Over the past three decades, the number of individuals going through deportation proceedings while held in immigration prisons has increased both absolutely and as a proportion of the overall immigration court docket. Immigrants with cases adjudicated in the detained docket are, obviously, detained—some without a right to a bond hearing, and some for months or years. Most attend court without representation by counsel. This ongoing project explores the significance of the detained immigration adjudication as a separate and segregated court system that incarcerates immigrants throughout the court process.


• Daniella Efrat (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Stanford University)
  Judicial Independence of Immigration Judges
  In the past, some Attorney Generals have adopted policies and issued statements that suggest their strong preference for a restrictionist or expansive approach to granting asylum petitions compared to their predecessors. This study aims to explore the extent such policies and statements have had an influence on the decision-making process of immigration judges' asylum case adjudication by analyzing the disposition of cases beginning in 2012 to date.


• Elizabeth Mitchell Elder (Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
  Single-Industry Dominance and Local Government Corruption
  Many American localities were dominated by a single industry at some point in their history. From coal mining towns in West Virginia to the auto manufacturing metropolis of Detroit, these places’ social and political institutions were shaped by the industries that dominated them. Locally-dominant industries often invest heavily in controlling local governments in the places they operate. Though some strategies for political control are fully legal (e.g. campaign contributions), the historical record offers many cases of companies engaging in corrupt practices to secure political gains. In a book manuscript in-progress, I argue these corporate influence efforts fostered corruption in local governments. What’s more, corruption in these governments has persisted even after the corporations have declined or departed. This culture of corruption, along with other effects of industry dominance of government, has fostered mistrust and anti-government attitudes among citizens of former single-industry areas. I have gathered data from US Census records to produce county-level measures of the extent to which a locality’s economy is dominated by a single industry over time. Data from TRACfed on referrals of local government corruption cases will allow me to calculate the prevalence of local government corruption across localities over time. Merging these two data sources, I will test whether local government corruption is more prevalent when places are dominated by a single industry and whether this corruption persists after the industry’s departure.


• Luzmarina Garcia (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  Benjamin Marx (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  Case Allocation Under Pressure: Evidence from Immigration Courts
  This project studies the assignment of cases to judges in an immigration court setting marked by explosive growth in case backlogs and pressure on judges to hear cases quickly. Judges’ ruling patterns vary considerably despite assignment of cases on a purportedly rotating and therefore quasi-random basis. This project will test for randomness of the assignment of cases and will study judge variance in leniency and speed of case completion. We will advance the literature that employs leave-out judge instruments by examining increases in time pressure and the connection between judge speed and rulings.


• Nancy Gertner (Judge, Law School, Harvard Unniversity)
  The Habits of Mass Incarceration Die Hard
  I m a retired federal judge, having served on the District Court of Massachusetts for 17 years. I currently teach sentencing and law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. I would like to study my former court, the District of Massachusetts over the past five years, in two arenas in which judicial discretion is exercised.First, with respect to sentencing: This is a court with the resources to carve out innovative sentencing alternatives, to treat the sentencing guidelines as truly advisory, to make meaningful changes in the sentencing of drug offenders. I want to study whether that is actually happening – or whether, as I have written about elsewhere, the “habits of mass incarceration die hard.” From anecdotal evidence, sentencing remains Guidelines based except when the government proposes something different. Even in that case, they are variations on a theme of Guidelines – ignoring addiction, adverse childhood trauma, ptsd, etc. And that would be all the more remarkable since the First Circuit, the court overseeing the District of Massachusetts, has largely affirmed any district court sentence so long as the guidelines were accurately computed. I want to identify whether the sentence that ensued was attributable to the prosecutor’s recommendation, defense counsel’s failure to oppose, and if I can, to the input of probation. Second, with respect to employment discrimination: It is widely believed that the federal courts are hostile to employment discrimination claims. At least one jurisdiction that was studied, N.D. Ga. reflected dismissal rates of 70-90% in employment cases. That meant dismissal on the basis of complaints, or summary judgment, at rates in some courts, far above the national average. I have written about this anecdotally in Losers’ Rules but would like to buttress that analysis with an empirical examination.


• Edwin Grimsley (Ph.D. Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York)
  Lidia Vasquez (Ph.D. Candidate, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York)
  The Criminal Deportation Pipeline
  The mass deportation of immigrants with criminal records has formed the cornerstone of increasingly punitive immigration policy in the United States over the past thirty years. The major categories of crimes for which lawful permanent residents (green card holders) can be removed are broad and amorphous, and for undocumented individuals, any conviction can lead to removal. Research has shown that racial and ethnic disparities profoundly impact the criminal justice system, adding to the risk of negative outcomes for Black and Latino immigrants in particular. We advance the concept of the “criminal deportation pipeline” to describe the intertwining criminal and immigration system processes that funnel certain immigrants toward removal. This National Science Foundation (NSF) funded study seeks to use ICE data to understand how the criminal justice system shapes and constitutes the immigration deportation process. The project aims to highlight racial, ethnic and spatial disparities in criminal justice and immigration enforcement, as well as local policies and practices that aid immigrants targeted for expulsion.


• Li Huang (Graduate Student, Criminology, Law and Society/School of Social Ecology, UC Irvine)
  A Synthetic Study of Corporate Prosecution and Punishment
  Corporate crime imposes a serious threat to U.S. society as well as the well-being of individual citizens. Yet, the state authority’s monitoring of corporate deviance is characterized by lax enforcement and lenient penalties, which have persisted to the extent that the U.S. law enforcement system controlling corporate crime is experiencing a “crisis of underenforcement”. There is insufficient social scientific examination of post-financial crisis corporate prosecution and punishment. My project uses multiple data sources and methods to examine post-financial crisis corporate crime enforcement and punishment through the lenses of legal endogeneity and symbolic punishment. The present study aims to contribute to scholarship by updating our knowledge about corporate punishment and intersecting the discourse of corporate crime control with sociolegal theories.


• Talia Inlender (Deputy Director, Center for Immigration Law and Policy, School of Law, UCLA)
  Hiroshi Motomura (Professor of Law, School of Law, UCLA)
  Benjamin Nyblade (Director, Empirical Research Group, School of Law, UCLA)
  Henry Kim (Statistician, Empirical Research Group, School of Law, UCLA)
  Timely and Fair?: The Use of Dedicated Dockets for Asylum-Seeking Families in the Los Angeles Immigration Court
  In May 2021, the Biden Administration announced a new “dedicated docket” to process the immigration court cases of asylum-seeking families arriving along the Southwest border. The Administration’s stated goal is to adjudicate these cases “more expeditiously and fairly.” The proposed research seeks to analyze whether that goal is being met, with a particular focus on Los Angeles’s dedicated docket. The data analysis will be complemented by court observations and qualitative interviews with relevant stakeholders. This multi-method approach will contribute to a deeper understanding of how the dedicated docket is (or is not) working in Los Angeles, with implications nationally.


• David Leblang (Professor of Politics, Politics & Public Policy, University of Virginia)
  “Border Enforcement: Deterrence, Deflection, or Downright Ineffective?.”
  Countries around the world have devoted enormous energies to decrease the unwanted immigration: border walls, deportations, third county agreements, border patrols, and the use of economic aid are all part of the policy toolbox. This project asks whether border protection and deportation efforts work: do they deter potential migrants? Or do they deflect migrants? I explore three different types of deflection: (1) deflection to other countries: does an increase in border security in the United States increase the number of unauthorized migrants in other countries en route to the US; (2) deflection to other sectors: exploiting the geographic variation across the US Southern Border, I examine whether an increase in security in sector i increase migration in sector j; (3) deflection of status: does an increase in border security increase the number of migrants attempting to enter the US via filing for political asylum? To explore these questions, I will combine data on the number of border patrol, construction of border barriers, and weather along the Southern Border with CBP arrests broken down by country of citizenship, border patrol sector, child/family group, and month/year. This will allow us to see if different forms of migration (authorized, unauthorized, and asylum) and different demographic types (family, single male, unaccompanied children) respond differently to changes in US policy.


• Tiffany J. Lieu (Albert M. Sacks Clinical Teaching and Advocacy Fellow, Harvard Law School, Harvard University)
  Sabrineh Ardalan (Clinical Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Harvard University)
  Expanding Access to Counsel in the Boston Immigration Court
  Immigration proceedings can have severe consequences on immigrants and their families. While immigrants in removal proceedings have a right to counsel, they do not have a right to government-funded counsel. Yet, legal representation is critical to an individual's ability to navigate immigration proceedings and obtain immigration relief. The proposed research seeks to analyze the need for access to counsel in the Boston Immigration Court, including representation rates, trends, and outcomes for immigrants in removal proceedings, both detained and non-detained. The data analysis will be complemented by qualitative interviews with attorneys, service providers, and immigrants themselves. The proposed research will deepen our understanding of representation rates and trends out of the Boston Immigration Court and shed light on the need for expanded access to counsel for those in removal proceedings in Boston.


• Eddie A Lucero (Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, UC Merced)
  Mobilization or Repression: The Effect of Latino Immigrant Deportations on Latino Voter Turnout
  Does an increase in the deportation of Latino immigrants mobilize or repress the Latino vote? In Ariel White’s “When Threat Mobilizes: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Voter Turnout”, the author argues and finds evidence that U.S. counties joining the “Secure Communities” deportation program posed a significant threat to Latinos and increased Latino voter turnout in counties that joined the program versus those that did not. However, this study was unable to take into account how variation in the actual increases in deportation rates of immigrants following counties’ implementation of the program affected Latino voter turnout. Building on social movement theory and theories of Latino group consciousness, I argue that an increase in the rate of Latino immigrant deportations increases Latino voter turnout but only in places where Latino organizations can help Latino voters overcome the negative psychological consequences that are a result of a racialized immigration enforcement policy. I test my theory with a national-level dataset that includes removals of Latino immigrants under the Secure Communities program, nonprofit registered Latino organizations, and county-level national election returns between 2009 and 2018.


• Eduardo Medina-Cortina (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Chamapign)
  Migrant Population Adjustments to Internal Immigration Enforcement
  This project investigates the migrant population effects of the Secure Communities program (SC). I focus on the Mexican-born population, the country’s single largest foreign-born demographic group and one that has been disproportionately affected by the program using multiple data sets. First, using national representative data, I estimate the magnitude if population size adjustment for the Mexican-born population for each SC removal. Next, using an administrative dataset from the Mexican government's registration of Mexican citizens living in the US, I show that the program’s activation reduces the annual inflow of new working-age immigrants over the study period. I show that this reduction is due to deterrence and sorting of new immigrants who change their settlement patters. Lastly, using TRAC data to assess enforcement intensity at a disaggregated geographical level, I estimate that SC drove a significant number of established migrants to relocate within the US.


• Tatiana Padilla (Ph.D. Candidate, Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University)
  Who, When, Where? Spatial, Temporal and Demographic Patterns of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) Fugitive Operations 2017-2020
  In the last 20 years, immigration enforcement in the US has expanded from borders to the interior of the country. Indeed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement�s interior enforcement grew three-fold, from an average of 10% to 34% of total yearly apprehensions, through cooperation with states and localities, growing budget and personnel, and increasing the number of fugitive operations (Cantor et al. 2019; Peterson 2009). The development and expansion of ICE enforcement tactics (e.g. ICE fugitive operations, 287(g) partnerships, Criminal Alien Program, and others) raise important questions about how apprehensions occur, where they take place, and who is being targeted (TRAC 2017). TRAC estimates that 88% of ICE community arrests are through ICE fugitive operations, an aggressive tactic that has devastating social and economic consequences for individuals, families and communities (Arnold et al 2020; Capps et al 2007; Hacker et al 2012; Marte 2019; Peterson 2009). Fugitive operations arrest individuals directly from the community, known as community arrests, as opposed to apprehensions that result when ICE assumes custody of individuals held by another law enforcement agency. Unfortunately, due to severe data limitations and lack of agency transparency much about these operations remain unclear. This study begins to fill this gap, and is one of the first projects to document key features of immigration raids: duration, seasonality, and geographic distribution. This project aims to understand how the experience of and exposure to ICE fugitive operations is differentially experienced across the US, and document the spatial and temporal attributes of operations between 2017 and 2020. More specifically, I ask: (1) Where are ICE raids occurring subnationally-- and what are the characteristics that set targeted communities apart from non-targeted communities? (2) Does the intensity of immigration raids vary subnationally? If so, what regions are experiencing the most intense (number of raids, number of apprehensions, length/duration of operation) levels of enforcement through fugitive operations?
  Publications:
  Deporting children: case outcomes for unaccompanied minors facing removal proceedings in US immigration court
  The Justice Gap for Unaccompanied Children in US Immigration Court: Rurality, Resources, and Client Characteristics as Determinants of Access to Counsel
  


• Jihye Park (Gradaute Student , Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa)
  Rene Rocha (Professor and Chair, Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa)
  Interior Immigration Enforcement and Migrant Behavior
  Since 2008, the Secure Communities (S-comm) program has allowed local law enforcement officers to identify and hold non-citizen residents for deportation. Although S-comm’s purpose is the reduction of undocumented immigrants, researchers have not fully studied its effectiveness. The current study seeks to answer whether the S-comm program has motivated the departure of undocumented Mexican immigrants, the largest undocumented group in the U.S.


• Jihye Park (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa)
  Rene Rocha (Professor and Chair, Political Science, University of Iowa)
  Interior Immigration Enforcement, Crime, and Penal Outcomes
  Since 2008, the Secure Communities (S-comm) program has expanded immigration enforcement from border to interior to make American communities safer. However, the use of excessive immigration enforcement may bring deleterious effects to local communities, such as racial profiling and undermining relationships between local law enforcement and residents. This study thus investigates whether the expansion of the S-comm program is related to broad crime and penal outcomes (e.g., detention rates and jail incarceration rates) in the United States.


• Dr. Jodi Quas (Professor, Psychological Science, University of California, Irvine)
  Allison D. Redlich (Director of Graduate Programs University Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George Mason University)
  Samantha Luna (Ph.D. Candidate, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George Mason University)
  Historical Trends in Criminal Prosecutions of Crimes Involving Sexual Abuse and Exploitation in the U.S.
  The overarching goal of our project is to document how criminal prosecutions of sex crimes and crimes involving exploitation (e.g., human trafficking) have changed over time, particularly since the passage of the TVPA in 2000. We are first interested in basic descriptive statistics on arrests, prosecutions, outcomes, and sentences. We are specifically comparing trends across criminal cases that contain charges of sexual abuse with contact, pornography, and sex trafficking/pandering Second, among the subset of cases involving charges of trafficking, we are conducting more in-depth analyses of cases that went to trial, focusing on the duration and details of the trial, the jurisdiction, and changes between the initial charges and final verdict. We are also collecting other information, as available, from both TRACfed and Bloomberg Law that may help understand nuances of prosecutions and case outcome. Ultimately, the information we collect will be summarized in empirical journals, presentations, and policy reports.


• Mr. Ricardo Robles Jr. (PhD Student, Political Science (Social Sciences and Humanities), UC Merced)
  The Influence of Workload on Judicial behavior in Immigration Courts
  For my research project, I am focused on examining whether increases in caseload throughout immigration courts result in an increased propensity to decide the case according to a judge’s ideological preferences. Drawing on insights from Cognitive Load Theory, when judges are faced with increases in their cognitive load—which here corresponds to increases in caseload—judges may engage in behaviors that reduce their cognitive effort. This may translate to an increased chance of judges relying on their ideological preferences to decide a case rather than exerting their cognitive effort on more complex legal arguments presented in a case in years where they have a high caseload, compared to years where they have a lower caseload. Most of the literature focused on immigration courts has examined the effect of legal representation on individuals facing a deportation case, which has overlooked the importance of extralegal aspects of immigration courts on outcomes.


• Mr. Brian Root (Senior Quantitative Analyst, US Program, Human Rights Watch)
  Alison Leal Parker (Managing Director, US Program, US Program, Human Rights Watch)
  Maritza Perez (Director of the Office of Federal Affairs, , Drug Policy Alliance)
  Disproportionate and Harmful Deportations of People from the US due to Drug Convictions
  Human Rights Watch and the Drug Policy Alliance intend to publish a short update to a 2015 report by Human Rights Watch entitled: A Price Too High: US Families Torn Apart by Deportations for Drug Offenses, June 16, 2015, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/06/16/price-too-high/us-families-tornapart-deportations-drug-offenses#7328. The proposed report update will contain: 1) qualitative interviews with directly affected people; 2) descriptive statistics on removals from the United States in which an individual’s most serious offense is recorded as a drug offense; and 3) state, federal, and international human rights policy analysis and recommendations for reform.
  Publications:
  https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/07/15/disrupt-and-vilify/war-immigrants-inside-us-war-drugs#209
  


• Emily Ryo (Professor of Law and Sociology, Law School, University of Southern California)
  Ian Peacock (Graduate Student, Department of Sociology, UCLA)
  Lawyering in Immigration Courts
  This study seeks to better understand the role of legal representation in crime-based removal proceedings. The research questions that guide the study include the following: (1) Are the background characteristics of legal service providers predictive of case outcomes? (2) How does the legal service providers’ prior history of appearing before certain judges impact case outcomes? (3) Do returns to legal representation vary across different groups of immigrants and if so, why?


• Dr. Brittany R Street (Assistant Professor, Economics, University of Missouri)
  The Effect of Racial Protests on Criminal and Civil Cases
  There now exists a body of evidence documenting two stylized facts in the criminal justice literature: several factors unrelated to the merits of the case affect defendant outcomes, and there exist significant racial disparities at all levels of the criminal justice system. This project aims to understand the effect of racial protests, namely recent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, on decisions in the courtroom in the United States. To do so, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) data will be linked to the U.S. Sentencing Commission and BLM protest records (similar to Cohen and Yang 2019). I will use two empirical approaches to estimate the causal effect of racial protests on convictions and sentencing behavior: a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) and a Generalized Difference-in-Differences (DiD) framework. The project will also document important sources of heterogeneity that may be masked by the overall treatment effect, namely differences along judge and defendant characteristics.


• Devon Thurman (Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science, Emory University )
  Judging by Video Teleconference: Evidence from United States Immigration Courts
  Does video teleconferencing (VTC) technology affect judicial decision making? A natural place to examine the effects of VTC on judicial decision making is in the context of United States immigration courts, which have used the technology to conduct removal hearings since 1996. VTC introduces the possibility that the way a person is treated by the legal system may depend on how she appears in court. Specifically, televideo respondents, the name for individuals who appear before an immigration judge by VTC, may fare worse in their immigration cases than similar individuals who appear in court in person. Recent empirical legal scholarship finds that televideo respondents are more likely than in-person respondents to be ordered deported. Importantly, these studies find no direct effect of VTC on judicial decision making but instead attribute these inferior outcomes to lowered engagement among televideo respondents with their legal process. To test whether and how VTC influences immigration judge decision making, I conduct a causal mediation analysis of administrative data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.


• Abigail Fisher Williamson (Associate Professor, Political Science and Public Policy & Law, Political Science, Trinity College)
  Federal Immigration Enforcement Retaliation to Municipal Welcoming Policies
  President Trump routinely threatened sanctuary cities, but did ICE enforcement actually increase in cities with welcoming policies toward immigrants? I aim to examine the relationship between cities� welcoming policies and county-level federal immigration enforcement over time. For the key explanatory variable, I have information on municipal policies through my 2014 and 2016 surveys of local government officials� responses to immigrants in US towns and cities (Williamson 2018). Subsequently, New American Economy has surveyed large cities annually using my instrument and other measures to comprise its Cities Index.



2021



• Dr. Julia A Behrman (Assistant Professor, Sociology/Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern)
  Isabel H. McLoughlin Brooks (Graduate Student, Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin)
  (Graduate Student, Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin)
  Abigail Weitzman (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin)
  Punitive Immigration Laws, Intimate Partner Violence, and Child Development
  Background: In the last two decades, US states have implemented an unprecedented number of punitive so-called “omnibus” immigration policies that aim to curb undocumented immigration from Latin America. While targeted at migrants, omnibus policies have consequences for Hispanic populations writ large due to racial profiling, harsh enforcement mechanisms, and large numbers of Hispanics living in mixed status families and communities where some members lack documentation. Still not well understood are how these omnibus immigration policies impact family relationship dynamics—such as intimate partner violence (IPV)— that have profound implications for health and well-being among affected populations. The analysis will examine how omnibus immigration law affects the risk of IPV and will further identify potential spillover effects on child development. Data and Methods: The proposed study will integrate geo-referenced micro-data on Hispanic origin, and IPV from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) with time-varying information about state or county-level immigration policies. The data requested in this application will provide an estimate of changing immigration policies, implementation and practice, which may impact family relationship dynamics with in Hispanic populations. Our research design (using a fixed effects strategy) will provide casual estimates of the effect of immigration policy implementation (such as detainers, removals, deportation proceedings, asylum decisions and immigration court backlog) on risk and reporting of IPV and impacts on child development.


• Adriana Cordis (Associate Professor, Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics, Winthrop University)
  An Analysis of Causes and Consequences of U.S. White-Collar Crime
  I plan to conduct a taxonomic analysis of white-collar crime in the United States. My emphasis will be on providing insights into the political and institutional determinants of fraud and the public policy implications of reducing the prevalence of fraud. The project is motivated in part by research that shows that both political alignment and public corruption are positively correlated with various measures of earnings management. Although earnings management is not fraud per se, it rises to the level of fraud if a company intentionally provides materially misstated information. By examining the impact of political and institutional determinants on the number of fraud convictions, my analysis will contribute to the understanding of the determinants of fraud and help policy-makers and professionals develop better fraud detection models.


• Milena Djourelova (Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Economics, Social Sciences Division, University of Chicago)
  Media Framing and Asylum Court Decisions
  Behavioral biases in judicial decision-making have been documented in a number of settings. Yet, an important source of potential bias remains understudied – that of media coverage of decision-relevant issues. While mass media provides objective information, it can also frame this information through an ideological or sensational lens, thus making decisions on relevant issues more subjective and vulnerable to behavioral biases. The aim of this project is to evaluate the effects of media framing on the issue of unauthorized immigration on judicial decisions in asylum court cases. I will exploit a unique natural experiment which produces exogenous variation in exposure to the “illegal immigrant” frame – a ban on this term in news-wire dispatches distributed by the Associated Press (AP).


• Paola Echave (PhD Student, Sociology, Ohio State University)
  Standing between a rock and a hard place: Consequences of adopting restrictive immigration policies on Covid deaths among Hispanics
  Based on key components of the minority stress model and the Latino threat narrative, I argue that immigration enforcement is detrimental to the overall well-being of communities because it instills distrust and fear. In a time when the coronavirus pandemic has impacted minorities at alarming rates, this project aims to determine how the continuous exposure to arrests and removals of immigrants has weakened communities and, thus contributed to more Covid deaths among Hispanics. I focus on deaths among Hispanics because these groups are primarely targeted by immigration enforcement and are likely to experience negative consequences from having relatives or friends removed from their communities. By employing a Bayesian approach, I analyze the association between continued exposure to immigration enforcement and Covid deaths in 2020 at the county level.


• Dr. Chiara Galli (Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Sociology, Cornell )
  Tatiana Padilla (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Cornell)
  Unaccompanied Minors in U.S. Removal Proceedings
  This study will examine trends in access to legal representation and trends in case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in U.S. removal proceedings. We will test a series of hypotheses that emerged in Chiara Galli’s ethnographic research on unaccompanied minors’ experiences navigating removal proceedings in Los Angeles, and applying for asylum and special immigrant juvenile status. We aim to investigate how representative these trends are at the national level by asking the following research questions: (1) Is increased federal and state funding for free legal services associated with an increase in access to representation among unaccompanied juveniles? (2) What role, if any, do minor’s demographic characteristics (nationality, age, gender, language spoken) play in access to legal representation? (3) What role, if any, do minor’s demographic characteristics (nationality, age, gender, language spoken) play in immigration case outcomes, beyond mitigating access to legal representation? (4) Have the Trump administration’s immigration policies targeting unaccompanied minors changed the odds of obtaining immigration relief among minors?


• William Greenlaw (Student, Law School, Harvard University)
  Firearm-Sentencing Priorities
  During the Trump Administration, the number of sentences consequently rose dramatically, especially for Black men. Starting in 2017, the number of firearms sentences rose nearly every year. The Eastern District of Missouri, for example, sentenced over four hundred Black defendants for firearms offenses. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., prosecutors began charging firearm possession crimes federally rather than locally, a policy the Biden Administration has indicated they will continue.7 For a Harvard Law Review student note, I propose using TRAC’s API access to follow the firearms sentencing trends, identify whether defendants were violent, see if the Biden Administration continues prior policy, conduct small case studies on the Eastern District of Missouri and Washington, D.C. or similar federal districts, and critique current approaches to firearm law enforcement.


• Peter Henderson (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University)
  Amit Haim (Ph.D. Candidate, School of Law, Stanford University)
  Ananya Kathik (Student, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford University)
  Julian Nyarko (Assistant Professor, School of Law, Stanford University)
  Dakota Foster (J.D. Candidate, School of Law, Stanford University)
  ICE, Algorithms, and the Constitution
  This project seeks to examine the effects of risk assessment algorithms on ICE detentions and detainers, as well as investigating the constitutional ramifications of these effects.


• Adi Leibovitch (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law , Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
  Kevin Cope (Associate Professor of Law, Law and Public Policy, Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, University of Virginia)
  Charles Crabtree (Assistant Professor, Department of Goverment, Dartmouth College)
  Bargaining in the Shadow of the Judge
  A long standing question in criminal justice regards the extent to which the identity of individual judges affects sentencing outcomes. In particular, with an overwhelming proportion of criminal cases resolved through plea bargaining, the question is whether parties bargain “in the shadow” of trial, and whether the characteristics and tendencies of the judge assigned to a case affect the negotiations between the prosecution and the defendant and the bargain struck. In this project we introduce new measures of judicial behavior that can help examine this question.


• Christopher M Levesque (PhD candidate, Sociology, University of Minnesota)
  Mapping U.S. Immigration Court
  U.S. immigration courts are “on the brink of collapse.” A key concern has been the growing backlog of cases impacting courts’ ability to ensure due process. However, the extent of the backlog differs by a court’s location. My dissertation compares the backlog’s effect in two jurisdictions: one with an above-average caseload (Omaha, NE) and another with a below-average amount (Bloomington, MN). In addition to my qualitative fieldwork, a key component to my project involves spatial quantitative methods that analyze the relationship between a court’s unique backlog and a non-citizen’s deportation risk. As such, I am requesting to become a TRAC Fellow in order to access private, individual-level immigration court data to refine my analysis.


• Aresha Martinez-Cardoso (Assistant Professor, Public Health Science, University of Chicago)
  Ties That Bind: Mixed-Status Immigrant Families, Immigration Enforcement, and Cardiometabolic Health
  Currently, 16.7 million children and adults in the United States live in a mixed-status immigrant family— families where some members are undocumented immigrants. An emerging body of research suggests that living in a mixed-status family can be consequential for children with undocumented parents or caretakers. In part, this may be because children are heightened to their family members’ risk of immigration detainment and deportation and attuned to an increasingly anti-immigrant climate in the US. The embodiment of these stressors may trigger a cascade of physiological processes that disrupt stress-response systems in the body leading to poor cardiometabolic health. To date, however, links between living in a mixed-status household, fear of immigration enforcement, and stress-response biomarkers that are associated with cardiometabolic risk have largely been unexplored in the literature. This objective of this study is to fill this gap by linking area-level immigration enforcement data to a community-based cohort study of Latino adults and children. Leveraging this data, I will employ multivariable regression models to assess the association between residence in MSHs and stress-biomarkers (Aim 1) and test whether area-level immigration enforcement mediates the relationship between MSHs and cardiometabolic risk (Aim 2). This work will help elucidate the unintended health consequences of contemporary immigration policies for adults and children who are embedded in social networks with undocumented immigrants.


• Douglas S Massey (Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Sociology and Public Policy, Princeton University)
  Assessing the Effects of Increased Deportations on Immigrant Remittance and Savings Decisions
  Beginning in the 1990s and intensifying after 9/11, deportations increased to record levels under Presidents Obama and Trump. Empirical evidence on how immigrants respond to this shifting context of reception is limited. In this study, we examine how the risk of deportation affects immigrants’ remittance and savings decisions. Migrant remittances and savings comprise a significant portion of foreign exchange within migrant-sending countries and foreign earnings play an important role in helping families to overcome budget constraints. Using detailed individual-level data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), we hypothesize that increases in deportations will be associated with a shift from a reliance on savings to finance spending at home to the sending of remittances. Such a shift would imply that recent increases in deportations neither increase nor decrease the revenue gained from labor in the United States, but instead simply prompt a shift in the modality of the transfer that has a neutral effect on a nation’s migratory revenues.


• Dr Caitlin Patler (Associate Professor of Sociology, Sociology Department, UC Davis)
  Konrad Franko (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology Department, UC Davis)
  Juan Manuel Pedroza (Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, UC Davis)
  Immigration Law Enforcement in the US interior
  We analyze when and where immigration law enforcement occurs in the US interior. We investigate what factors predict changes in immigration law enforcement.
  Publications:
  Punishing status and the punishment status quo: Solitary confinement in U.S. Immigration prisons, 2013–2017
  


• Angela Remus (J.D. Candidate, Law School, Yale University)
  ()
  The Consequences of Complementary Protection for Asylum
  While complementary forms of protection, such as protection under the Convention Against Torture, expand the class of people who are eligible for protection in the United States, the availability of these mechanisms may have unintended consequences. As others have acknowledged—with limited empirical support—“complementary protection schemes . . . constitute subtle tools for undermining the universal refugee regime.” Based on anecdotal evidence, we hypothesize that, in some cases, immigration judges are denying asylum and instead granting CAT, even when a noncitizen presents a colorable asylum claim. This has consequences for the asylum seeker, who receives a more tenuous form of protection, as well as for asylum law, which may be insulated from doctrinal development.


• Zabdi Salazar (Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, Berkeley Law)
  Immigration Judges and Bureaucracy: The impact of case quotas and caseloads on judicial behavior and case outcomes.
  Immigration judges (IJs) are at the front lines in deciding many high stakes immigration cases, balancing the legal principles of equal justice under the law and timely adjudication. However, given massive immigration backlogs and systemic challenges, the EOIR under the Trump Administration instituted performance measures on IJs that went into effect in FY 2019, which included case completion goals. This exogenous policy allows us to examine how bureaucratic factors, such as case completion goals and caseloads impact IJs behavior and case outcomes. This study will use a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach to examine how the FY 2019 performance standards, particularly the requirement for judges to complete 700 cases each year, impacted judicial behavior and case outcomes. This approach will exploit the fact that there is variation in how many cases judges complete per year, i.e., there are fast and slow moving judges, prior to the FY 2019 performance standards.


• Justin Schon (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Politics, University of Virginia)
  David Leblang (Professor of Politics and Public Policy, Director of the Global Policy Center, Department of Politics, University of Virginia)
  Delay and Deflect: Instrumental Variable-Mediation Analysis of the Effects of Border Enforcement on Undocumented Migration
  How does border enforcement affect undocumented migration flows? Standard intuition suggests that border enforcement activities by the governments of immigration hubs like the United States, Europe, and Australia can reduce undocumented migrant flows across their borders. It is unclear, however, whether these reductions result from the increased danger or financial cost of migration following increases in border enforcement. Furthermore, it is also unclear whether border enforcement actually blocks migration, rather than delaying or deflecting that migration. Using data on undocumented migration and border enforcement from the United States, we employ instrumental variable-mediation analysis to unpack whether border enforcement effort has a direct effect on undocumented migration or indirect effects via migrant deaths or smuggling costs. We find that undocumented migrants respond to the physical danger and cost of crossing borders, rather than directly to enforcement itself. Migrant responses to border enforcement, meanwhile, tend to involve delaying their onward migration or deflection. This deflection could be spatial—shifting routes—or status—shifting between irregular and regular migration status.


• Maya Sen (Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
  Public Defender Experience and Case Outcomes
  This project will investigate whether a judges' previous experience with the criminal justice system impacts their subsequent rulings.


• Matthew Smoldt (Doctoral Student, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University)
  Valerie Mueller (Assistant Professor, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University)
  Cameron Thies (Professor, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State University)
  Interstate Remittances and the Host Country
  Much literature on interstate remittances – that is, migrant laborers’ monetary transfers – focuses on the recipient country. Thus, the host country remains understudied. To fill this gap, we theorize on remittances’ political determinants in the host country. In general, we argue remitters adjust their monetary transfers in response to the host country's immigration policy. In particular, remittance flows vary with subnational enforcement of the host country's immigration policy. We test our theory in the context of the United States' Secure Communities program, a nationwide policy involving local-federal partnerships to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. We expect Mexican laborers in the United States to insure themselves against deportation, and its attendant unemployment, by remitting more when deportations increase. The results of our analysis will illuminate the indirect effects of politics on immigrants. More specifically, the analysis will illuminate the effect of host countries’ immigration policy, namely, its enforcement, on interstate remittances.


• Emily Weisburst (Assistant Professor, Public Policy, UCLA)
  Elisa Jacome (Postdoctoral Fellow, Economics, Stanford Univresity)
  Felipe Goncalves (Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, UCLA)
  Immigration Enforcement, Crime, and Community Trust
  The United States invests heavily in immigration enforcement, with a focus on deporting immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally with criminal records. Despite the central importance criminal deterrence plays in immigration enforcement, there is little research on the impact of immigration enforcement on the criminal environment in the United States. In our project, we plan to evaluate the effect of changes in immigration enforcement on both crime rates and crime reporting behavior. To measure crime rates and willingness to report crime, we intend to use the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), a survey that is uniquely able to measure crime reporting behavior conditional on victimization. Our main measure of immigration enforcement will be monthly counts of the number of ICE detainers issued in each county in the United States, measured using supplemental data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRACFed). We will measure immigration enforcement in two ways. First, we will study the rollout of the Secure Communities program between 2008 and 2014, which enhanced cooperation between local and federal law enforcement and subsequently increased the number of detainers and deportations. Second, we will measure the number of individuals detained by immigration agencies in a county-by-year and use an instrumental variables strategy to identify the causal effect of changes in the intensity of immigration enforcement. Moreover, our analysis will test how impacts on victimization and reporting vary according to survey participant demographics or by the types of individuals who are detained (e.g., their country of origin).


• Shijun Xia (Ph.D. Candidate, Paul Merage School of Business, The University of California, Irvine)
  IRS Attention and Mandatory Disclosure of Violation of False Claim Act
  I examine whether the mandatory disclosure of criminal records attracts IRS attention and increases the probability of IRS audit. I hypothesize that because of the potential deterrent effect, both IRS attention and IRS audit decrease after the adoption of the mandatory disclosure.



2020



• Dr. Chenoa Dawn Allen (Assistant Professorof Health Sciences, School of Health Professions, University of Missouri)
  The impact of immigration arrests and sanctuary policies on immigrant health
  Immigration enforcement will have long-term economic and public health impacts for the US. As immigration enforcement intensifies and immigration policies become more restrictive, immigrants and their children report more stress, worse physical and mental health, and worse health care access. An increasing number of local governments have put in place policies that could reduce these impacts on immigrants by reducing immigrant arrests and deportations. ICE relies on assistance from local law enforcement agencies in order to do its job efficiently. In recent years, state and local governments have begun limiting this cooperation. Policies that limit cooperation are typically referred to as sanctuary policies; states, counties, and cities that have at least one of these policies in place are considered sanctuary jurisdictions. Preliminary data suggests that these policies reduce the number of arrests and deportations from the jurisdiction, but these results are inconclusive, and there is some evidence that sanctuary policies may lead to increased at-large arrests of noncriminal immigrants. There has also been little research on the impact of sanctuary policies on health. This study will use quasi-experimental methods and nationally-representative data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to fill this gap by answering the following research questions: 1. Do sanctuary policies reduce the number of ICE arrests or lead to a shift in who is arrested by ICE? 2. Does health worsen for immigrants and their children as the number of immigrant arrests in their county increases? 3. Do local policies and local immigration-related resources buffer the harmful health effects of immigration enforcement?


• Dr Asad L Asad (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Sociology, Stanford University)
  Association of Immigration Enforcement with Infant Outcomes
  The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of local immigration enforcement on one or more indicators of infant health. We will ask the following research question: does local immigration enforcement lead to fewer infant births, lower infant birthweight, and more infant deaths among children born to immigrant mothers? And, if so, do these outcomes vary by the citizenship and/or legal status of the mothers? We expect the study to reveal heterogeneous effects of local immigration enforcement on these multiple measures of infant health. This research will broaden our understanding of the connection between immigration enforcement and health, and the intergenerational consequences of our current immigration system.


• Marta Ascherio (Ph.D. Candidate , Sociology, University of Texas at Austin)
  National Immigrant Justice Center: Three Fact Sheets on Immigrant Detention
  The Incarceration of immigrants for civil case processing has been a failed experiment that has been rising exponentially in costs to American taxpayers and is detrimental to communities all over the United States. Rather than protecting community safety, these racially and politically motivated detention practices destabilize families, are sites for serious violations of human rights, and use immense resources that could instead be invested in programs to fight poverty, systemic oppression, and strengthen public services. The data requested in this application will facilitate the development of educational materials regarding immigration detention for elected officials, policy makers and the public. With access to TRAC data on detention, I will be able provide details on the detention population including breakdowns by facility, country of origin, length of time in the US, and also the types of crime people in detention are being convicted with.


• Cynthia Bansak (Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, St. Lawrence University)
  Sarah Pearlman (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Vassar College)
  Endogamous Marriage among Immigrant Groups: The Impact of Deportations under the Secure Communities Act
  In this paper we investigate the impact of deportations on the marriage patterns of immigrant women living in the U.S. To measure shocks to local marriage markets we focus on MSA-level deportations under the Secure Communities Act that began in 2008. Using Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) data, we first document that there were large differences in deportation rates across country of origin groups; Mexican and Central American-born men comprised the vast majority of removals between 2008 and 2019, but the average removal rates range from less than a percent for those from Colombia, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic to as high as 12 percent for those from Guatemala. Meanwhile, before the Secure Communities Act, the vast majority of immigrant woman reported being in endogamous marriages(married to someone from the same country of origin), as calculated using the ACS from 2005-2008. For example, over 64% of women from El Salvador were married to spouses from El Salvador, while over 80% of Mexican born women were married to Mexican born men. In this study, we examine what occurred to these patterns of endogamous marriage when men { possibly husbands or potential husbands { from the same country were removed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Overall, we find evidence that deportations at the MSA level increase the likelihood of endogamous marriage and decrease exogamous marriage. The latter we define as marriage to an immigrant from another country or a native-born spouse. We do not find that a shift towards marrying a citizen is driving the results and our results are robust for both Mexican and non-Mexican sub samples. Going forward we plan to parse out the mechanism at work to determine whether the shift towards even greater endogamy post-Secure Communities Act is a result of selection (family reunification reason for initial migration), a change in location (higher mobility for single women),or a change in marriage markets themselves (marriage as protection from deportation, especially with a US-born child).
  Publications:
  Marriage and immigration enforcement: The impact of Secure Communities on immigrant women
  


• Courtney Boen (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
  Nick Graetz (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
  Robin Ortiz (Doctor, MSHP Student, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania)
  Atheendar S. Venkataramani (Assistant Professor, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania)
  The Roles of State and Local Immigration Policy in Shaping Spatial and Life Course Patterns of Health Inequality
  This project will improve scientific understanding of the role of state and local sociopolitical contexts in contributing to population health disparities across the life course by examining how restrictive immigration policies and immigration enforcement activities shape health risk from birth through late life, paying particular attention to the relative health and well-being of U.S.- and foreign-born Hispanics. Leveraging a variety of rich state, county, and individual data, this project aims to: 1) Examine the role of restrictive immigration state laws in contributing to racial-ethnic and immigrant-native disparities in birth outcomes and physiological functioning in adulthood. 2) Assess how state and local ICE activity shapes racial-ethnic and immigrant-native disparities in birth outcomes and physiological functioning in adulthood.


• Lori A Brown (Professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University)
  Neha Tummalapalli (Research Assistant, School of Architecture, Syracuse University)
  Birthing, Borders and Bodies
  Birthing, Borders and Bodies explores how historical, legal, and immigration frameworks come to define spaces of care for those seeking to cross nation-state borders to enter into the United States, but also into Canada. This project, which will result in a six-chapter book, examines legal definitions of borders and citizenship which directly influence how space is controlled, inhabited, and transgressed, how the physical and biological needs of those who enter both legally and illegally are provided for, and the histories of those who have provided care over the past several decades. Surveillance and enhanced border technologies have come to have an ever-greater influence on the border’s on-the-ground conditions.


• Christine Cai (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics, Princeton University)
  Tightening Immigration Policy: Unintended Consequences on U.S. Hispanic Citizens' Health Behavior and Status
  Although American citizens are not subject to removal due to immigration enforcement policies, having members of their ethnic/racial community who are at risk of deportation and/or fearing being mistakenly arrested and detained may constitute an important source of stress for them. This project seeks to examine the indirect, unintended effects of the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws on the health behavior and outcomes of U.S. Hispanic citizens. To investigate the extent to which tightening immigration policy indirectly affects the health behavior and status of U.S. Hispanic citizens, I plan to examine various immigration enforcement programs – i.e., the staggered rollout across counties of Secure Communities between 2008 and 2014 and its reactivation in 2017, as well as the Priority Enforcement Program implemented between 2015 and 2017. The empirical analysis will essentially consist in exploiting the timing of the aforementioned immigration enforcement policies to compare the evolution of outcomes (i.e., measures of health behavior and status) for Hispanics to those for non-Hispanic individuals and investigate the underlying mechanisms.


• Daniel Chen (Professor, School of Economics, University of Toulouse)
  Lev Tatz (Web Developer, School of Economics, University of Toulouse)
  Asylum Court Decision Predictor
  In the United States, foreign nationals who fear persecution in their home country can apply for asylum under the Refugee Act of 1980. The project uses a large data set secured under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request detailing United States Asylum court decisions going back multiple decades and machine learning to predict the outcomes of the cases. We are able to predict the final outcome of a case with 80% accuracy at the time the case opens. Using data available on the decision date, our model correctly classifies 82% of all refugee cases by 2013. Visit http://asylumcasepredictor.org


• Sabrina M. Dycus (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, New York University)
  Videoteleconference Technology in Immigration Courts and Case Outcomes: A Natural Experiment
  The number of legal processes that use videoteleconference technology ("VTC") is increasing at rapid clip. However, we do not yet know whether VTC's affordances cause disparities in case outcomes between litigants who appear in court in person and litigants who appear in court via VTC. My research exploits two natural experiments in a detained docket immigration court in New York City to determine whether VTC's affordances cause worse outcomes for people who appear for immigration removal hearings via VTC, as compared to people who appear for immigration removal hearings in person.


• Angela K Gore (Professor of Accountancy, Department of Accounting, The George Washington University)
  Jennifer Spencer (Professor of International Business & International Affairs, School of Business, The George Washington University)
  James Wade (Professor of Strategy & Leadership, Department of Strategic Management & Public Policy, The George Washington University)
  Windfall federal grants and local government corruption
  The purpose of our study is to investigate whether large grant shocks contribute to public corruption, and whether transparency and monitoring mechanisms help ameliorate it.


• Paola D. Langer (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, University of California, Davis)
  Caitlin Patler (Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of California, Davis)
  Erin R. Hamilton (Associate Professor, Sociology, University of California, Davis)
  Immigration law enforcement and birth outcomes in the United States
  We aim to analyze the impact of various measures of immigration law enforcement on birth outcomes in the United States. Research based on quasi-experimental design shows that restrictive immigration law and immigration raids increases the risk and prevalence of low birthweight of infants born to US-Born & foreign-born Latina mothers (Novak et al, 2017; Torche & Sirois, 2018) . Indicative of a direct effect on the populations being targeted by immigration enforcement and of a spill-over effect, this research invites to conduct more systematic & nationally-wide studies examining the effect of imigration enforcement on immigrant populations health outcomes.


• Mitzia E Martinez Castellanos (Fellow, Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP), Ceres Policy Research / Berkeley Law School)
  Angela Irvine Baker (Professor, , Ceres Policy Research)
  Understanding How the Availability of Jail, Prison, and ICE Detention Beds Impacts ICE Enforcement and Practices
  As jurisdictions and institutions grapple with COVID-19 and demands to de-carcerate individuals as a matter of public health, advocates are concerned that detention beds no longer in use by the criminal carceral system are being repurposed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain immigrants, leading to an uptick in immigration enforcement. While we know that cooperation with local law enforcement increases ICE arrests, limited research has been conducted - beyond anecdotal cases - about the relationship between the availability of detention beds and enforcement practices. Therefore, we are examining whether ICE arrests increase in areas with more detention bed availability and if a detention center closes, whether there is a decrease in enforcement practices thereafter. The findings of this analysis will help to support the advocacy efforts of the Detention Watch Network (DWN) and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) to advocate against the building of new ICE detention facilities, decrease the incarceration of undocumented immigrants, and ultimately work towards dismantling the arrest-to-deportation pipeline and the harmful relationship between the criminal justice system and the immigration system.


• Carlo Medici (Ph.D. Candidate, MEDS (Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences), Northwestern University)
  Appealing Sentences? Political Connections, Career Perspectives, and Performance of US Federal Judges
  The main goal of the project is to study how judges’ decisions are influenced by politics. In particular, the focus of the research question is on whether federal judges who are linked to politicians produce sentences that are different from the ones of their unconnected colleagues, and why.


• Kirsten Slungaard Mumma (Ph.D. Candidate, Education, Harvard Unviersity)
  The effects of immigration enforcement on the economic and educational outcomes/opportunities of children and young people in the U.S.
  As of 2014, there were 3.9 million children enrolled in public and private schools in the United States with at least one unauthorized parent, or about 7.3% of total enrollment, the vast majority (81%) of whom are U.S.-born citizens (Passel & Cohn, 2016). A growing literature has highlighted the negative effects of immigration enforcement activities on the educational, economic, and psychological well-being of children with undocumented family members (Amuedo-Dorantes & Arroyo, 2019; Amuedo-Dorantes, Arroyo, & Sevilla, 2018; Martinez et al. 2015). This project will explore the effects of immigration enforcement on the human capital investments of children in (likely/possible) immigrant families. Specifically, this study will use variation in the timing and intensity of immigration enforcement activities across communities to study the effect of enforcement activities on (1) preschool enrollment and (2) participation in school choice program. This project will also test alternative measures of local enforcement activity to determine which are most associated with changes in educational investment behavior.


• Julian Nyarko (Assistant Professor of Law, Law School, Stanford University)
  Michael Livermore (Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law, Law School, University of Virginia)
  Long-Term Effects of Egregious Crimes on Sentencing
  This project assess the existence and magnitude of short- to midterm effects on judicial behavior from exposure to uncommon cases. We define "uncommon cases" as those indicative of (i) a particularly egregious crime, and (ii) wrongful conviction cases.


• Anne Piehl (Professor, Department of Economics, Rutgers University)
  Vinay Ravinder (Student, Department of Economics, Rutgers University)
  Judicial Backgrounds and Sentencing Decisions
  This paper will examine several traits of federal judges and estimate their impact on the length of sentences that judges impose, as well as on the presence and severity of racial and gender disparities in sentencing. These traits might include time of appointment, age, political party of appointing president, time on the bench, the status of the federal sentencing guidelines at the time of appointment, and previous legal experience. In the course of this analysis, we aim to assess the impact of recently confirmed judges, a disproportionate number of whom have been rated as unqualified by the ABA or have nontraditional legal backgrounds, on the levels of disparities in sentencing.


• Joost Sijthoff (Research Professional, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago Booth)
  Luigi Zingales (Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, School of Business, University of Chicago Booth)
  Corruption and the Influence of State Supreme Court Election Donations.
  Many states select supreme court judges using competitive elections. Although the election system contributes to the independence of state supreme courts, a natural concern is that campaign contributions influence the decisions of elected judges. Empirical results of previous research are inconsistent, partially due to differences in samples. In this project, we collect supreme court cases of all 21 states with an election system and match at case*judge, constructing the most comprehensive data on this topic by far. Compared to previous research which typically focused on cases in one state and limited time spans, the extensity of our dataset allows us to control for variables omitted in previous research. Specifically, case and judge fixed effect which substantially alter the findings. Preliminary analysis suggest that contributions might indeed affect case rulings. Since initial results vary substantially by state, we are currently investigating factors that might explain this variation. To this end, we want to investigate the relationship between state-level measures of public corruption and our results.


• Ms Zayda Sorrell-Medina (PhD Candidate , Urban Planning and Public Policy, University of California, Irvine)
  Measuring the impact of the immigrant-serving third sector
  International migration and migrant illegality are top priorities for many governments. In some regions, governments are tightening migratory controls leading to civil and human rights violations. Against this backdrop, the immigrant-serving nonprofit scholarship has consistently found that immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations play a critical role in contributing to immigrants’ rights and inclusion in society. Yet, much is still unknown about the immigrant-serving third sector, including its mission, strategies, and quantitative impact. In particular, this study has identified five research problems in the immigrant-serving nonprofit, third sector, and immigrant regularization scholarships for which it aims to address. The first limitation is that nonprofit theories which seeks to explain the role and function of nonprofits in society do not adequately account for the conditions that drive immigrant-serving nonprofit to emerge. This gives rise to questions on the generalizability of nonprofit theories across subsectors and its potential bias towards mainstream nonprofits. Secondly, the immigrant-serving nonprofit scholarship employs primarily case study methods focusing on organizations in one or a few cities, which lacks the basis for generalizations. Hence, knowledge on the subsector as a whole remains limited. Third, a growing number of studies have found that there is a relationship between local context and immigrant-serving nonprofit strategies, which can subsequently affect immigrant inclusion outcomes such as the enactment of inclusionary policies. This relationship, however, has only been studied at the meso-level in organizations in select cities. A closer examination is needed on how the relationship manifests at the macro-level across multiple regions to fully ascertain the extent of the relationship. Fourth, while several studies have established a link between immigrant-serving nonprofits and immigrant legalizations outcomes, many studies that seek to explain variation in asylum and deportation rates omit immigrant-serving nonprofits in their model. This potentially gives rise to omission variable bias and endogeneity. Lastly, this study advances a strategy scale that measures the dominant strategies employed by immigrant-serving nonprofits. Yet, questions remain on the external validity of the scale across national context. The dissertation addresses these limitations in four essays that examines the scope and impact of the US immigrant-serving third sector on immigrant inclusion. It focuses on three dimensions of inclusion: legal status, rights, and cultural acceptance. The four questions are examined: 1. What is the mission and strategies of the US immigrant-serving nonprofit sector? 2. How do US immigrant-serving nonprofit strategies differ in inclusive and exclusionary US cities? 3. What is the relationship immigrant-serving nonprofit density on asylum and deportation rates in US cities? 4. Is the US immigrant-serving nonprofit strategy scale appropriate for cross-national use? A Dutch sample of immigrant-serving nonprofits is incorporated to test the extent to which findings are generalizable. Data sources include secondary data, interviews and surveys. Methods include qualitative thematic analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and panel regression. This work is pioneering as only a handful of have sought to investigate the scope and impact of immigrant-serving nonprofits from a macro-level of analysis. The empirical contribution is that results in a validated scale that measures the strategies of the US immigrant-serving nonprofit sector, which can be used for testing relevant hypothesis and explaining variation in regional level immigrant outcomes. Results from this study also offers fresh insights on new questions that can be explored in future research. Theoretically, the study provides insights that can refine third sector theories to achieve greater generalizability across subsectors. The practical contribution of the study is that it provides activists, volunteers, and immigrant-serving nonprofit leaders with useful information for strategic planning and decision making. The policy implication is that it sheds light on the strengths of this powerful subsector, which provides local and federal government officials insights on how they can leverage nonprofit resources to address international migration and meet the local immigrant community’s needs.


• Tara Watson (Professor, Economics, Williams College)
  “The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on Infant Health”
  This project investigates the link between immigration enforcement and the health of infants born to foreign-born mothers. Immigration enforcement varies widely across time and space, and the appropriate level of enforcement is an active area of policy debate. A potential unintended consequence of immigration enforcement is adverse health outcomes experienced by children born into families that are directly or indirectly affected. The proposed study will use differences-in-differences analysis to characterize the relationship between interior immigration enforcement at the local level and birth outcomes.



2019



• Marta Ascherio (Ph.D. Candidate , Sociology, University of Texas at Austin)
  Immigration Policy in an Era of Surveillance
  The United States has entered an era of immigration enforcement characterized by automated data sharing technology and increasing pressure for state and local authorities to enforce immigration law (Meissner et al. 2013; Treyger, Chalfin, and Loeffler 2014). This era arises in tandem with an intellectual turn in technology and surveillance studies, a turn that emphasizes how surveillance technologies are embedded in cultural systems (Monahan 2011), and are tools for social sorting and discrimination (Lyon 2009). I will use comparative historical methods in order to investigate the “many hands of the state” (Morgan and Orloff 2017) involved in physically and symbolically building an immigrant surveillance apparatus. Specifically, I will focus on the use of technology to control immigrants, in period of time after the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, and up until when the Secure Communities Program was re-instated in 2017. In particular I am interested in the following puzzle: how and why was the Secure Communities Program, the most extensive immigrant control program in US historical, implemented during a liberal administration, under the leadership of President Obama who ran on a platform of comprehensive immigration reform? What other national forces, or foreign policy priorities, were at play in shaping the implementation of this program?


• Dr. Jennifer Bachner (Director, MS in Government Analytics, Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, Johns Hopkins University)
  Benjamin Ginsberg (Professor of Political Science and Chair , Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, John Hopkins University)
  Political Corruption in the U.S. States
  This analysis is part of a larger book project about state governments; the book provides a critical examination of state executive power, representation in state legislatures, elections, citizen knowledge of state government and civic education. One of the chapters in the book focuses on political corruption in state governments. Included in the chapter is an analysis of corruption over time by state and local officials. Visualizations and analysis of these trends across the 50 states provide insight into which types of state government institutions are most vulnerable to political corruption.


• Derek Christopher (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, University of California Irvine)
  Seeking Sanctuary: Housing Undocumented Immigrants
  The economics literature is well-informed on the effects of legal immigration on labor market outcomes, legal immigration on housing market outcomes, and unauthorized immigration on labor market outcomes. However, due primarily to data limitations, there have yet to be any extensive studies with a focus on unauthorized immigration and housing market outcomes. Borrowing from the labor and urban literature, I evaluate the impact of the criminal justice system's response to unauthorized immigration on housing market outcomes. I employ a triple differences strategy to evaluate how Sanctuary City policies impacted rental housing markets, specifically for undocumented immigrants.


• Alberto Ciancio (Post-Doc, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania)
  Immigration enforcement and public trust
  The goal of this research project is to contribute towards a better understanding of the effects of immigration enforcement on the level of collaboration of immigrants and Latinos with the police. In particular, I combine data on ICE arrests "at large" and 911 calls at the county level to estimate the effect of federal immigration actions (raids) on service calls. The period I examine (2014-2018) is particularly interesting as it allows to look at the effects of the Trump presidency on federal immigration enforcement and its consequences for public trust in Latino and immigrant communities.


• Decio Coviello (Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor of Economics, Applied Economics, HEC Montreal)
  Judicial Productivity in Asylum Decisions
  According to TRAC (2019) The Immigration Court's backlog keeps rising. As of the end of May 2018, the number of cases waiting decision reached an all-time high of 714,067. This compares with a court backlog of 542,411 cases at the end of January 2017. During the last two years backlog increased by almost a third (32%) with 171,656 more cases added. The aim of this project is to document the evolution of growing backlogs and how this affects duration of asylum trials.


• Rene Crespin (Ph.D. Candidate, Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University)
  The effects of immigration enforcement on the housing market
  This project contributes to research on the demographic and economic impacts of immigration enforcement. I present new evidence on the impacts of local immigration enforcement policies on home buyers and how these polices are capitalized into home prices. I exploit the variation in timing, geography, and intensity of local immigration enforcement policies to study their effects.


• Nino José Cricco (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Harvard University)
  Immigration Enforcement, Intermarriage, and Ethnic Attrition Among the Descendants of Hispanic/Latino Immigrants
  I examine how transformations in the state’s immigration regulations shape ethnic identity and intermarriage among immigrants of Hispanic descent. Though not at risk of deportation, native-born Hispanics face the burden of an increase in the salience of Hispanic ethnicity in the context of high immigration enforcement, shaping intergroup dynamics among individuals with no Hispanic ancestry and those with Hispanic ancestry, as well as the intragroup dynamics among all individuals with Hispanic ancestry.


• Thomas S Dee (Barnett Family Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University)
  Mark Murphy (Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University)
  The Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement on Schools and Students
  We are proposing quasi-experimental analyses that examine the causal impact of local immigration enforcement on various school-related outcomes. In particular, our intent is to focus on Hispanic and non-Hispanic school enrollment. In a recent study of the 287(g) program, we found evidence that the adoption of an ICE-police partnership led to a dramatic reduction in Hispanic (but not non-Hispanic) enrollment. We argue that school enrollment data provide a better barometer of demographic change than surveys that are unreliable measures of the undocumented population. We also argue that this research provides novel evidence on how immigration enforcement influences students and schools (e.g., catalyzing developmentally harmful mobility). In this proposed analysis, we intend to focus on the most recent increase in interior immigration enforcement. We intend to use different measures based on immigration arrests or detainers as an omnibus measure of interior enforcement. Our panel-based research designs (e.g., “difference in differences”) will leverage the variation in arrests and school outcomes over space and time to identify the impact of enforcement changes. The link to the 287(g) study above provides access to more methodological details.


• Abigail S Friedman (Assistant Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health , Yale University)
  Venkataramani Atheendar (Assistant Professor, Division of Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania)
  Chilling Effects: Immigration and Customs Enforcement Activity and Health Care Seeking Among Hispanics in the General US Population
  A variety of studies show that immigration policy affects the health of undocumented immigrants. Yet these policies may also impact the health of citizens. For example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity could affect the mental health and heath care seeking behavior of the US Hispanic population, due to fears of profiling and discrimination towards oneself or a family member. To consider this, the proposed research will match TRAC I-247 detention request data to individual respondent data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) dataset. The BRFSS’s annual survey is nationally representative for the United States’ non-institutionalized, civilian adult population. Quasi-experimental regression analyses will compare how within-state shifts in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity relate to health care access and behavior among Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic respondents (e.g., having had an annual checkup, having a regular provider, etc.). If increases in I-247 requests per capita are associated with decreased health care use among the Hispanic population, but not the non-Hispanic population, this would suggest a “chilling effect” of ICE activity on health care in the Hispanic community.
  Publications:
  By Abigail S. Friedman and Atheendar S. VenkataramaniChilling Effects: US ImmigrationEnforcement And Health CareSeeking Among Hispanic Adults
  


• Vladimir Kogan (Associate Professor, Political Science, Ohio State University)
  Alex Acs (Assistant Professor, Political Science, Ohio State University)
  Effect of Performance Quotas on Immigration Case Outcomes and Judicial Behavior
  The purpose of this project is to examine how the pressure to hit judicial quotas on the number of cases decided change the outcome of immigration cases, the leniency of individual judges, and the process for petitioners. To do so, we plan to use the “bunching” estimator and the new numerical targets for case completion put into place starting with the 2019 fiscal year.


• Joscha Legewie (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Harvard University)
  Nino José Cricco Doldan (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, Harvard University)
  Immigration Enforcement and the Educational Achievement of Minority Youth
  How does the expansion of immigration enforcement affect the educational outcomes and health of minority youth? Previous research documents how the rollout of policies that partner local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement reduce enrollment among Hispanic students (Dee and Murphy 2018) and have a negative impact on student achievement (Bellows forthcoming). Social scientists have examined how the enactment of policies such as 287(g) or Secure Communities and the rate of removals that they account for shape Hispanic’s outcomes by exploiting the staggered roll-out of these policies to estimate causal effects, but the use of cross-sectional data and the focus on estimating main effects has limited our understanding of the mechanisms that link immigration enforcement policies with minority student’s educational outcomes and health. In this project, we aim to examine the mechanisms through which immigration enforcement shapes minority student’s outcomes by linking longitudinal data on student achievement with data on the permanent addresses of immigrants undergoing removal proceedings over the same time period.


• Christopher Levesque (Ph.D. Candidate, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota)
  Jack DeWaard (Affiliate Faculty member, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota)
  Linus Chan (Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Law School, University of Minnesota)
  Promoting Transparency and Engagement in U.S. Immigration Court by Ensuring the Quality and Utility of Data Collected by Volunteer Observers
  Our proposed project addresses the need for greater transparency and participant engagement in U.S. immigration court in order to hold government agencies accountable for actual or potential human rights violations. Following the 2016 presidential election, the UMN Law School’s James H. Binger Center for New Americans launched the Human Rights Defender Project in collaboration with Robins Kaplan LLC and The Advocates for Human Rights. This project utilizes volunteer observers to attend immigration court hearings and report on issues of concern, including observations related to the observer’s own subjective interpretations of judge respect, attorney representation, and detainee engagement. In the swirl of activity after the 2016 presidential election, the capacity of the Binger Center was stretched thin, and a critical need emerged to validate the data obtained from volunteer immigration court observers against other external sources, e.g., those provided by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Dr. Jack DeWaard (UMN Sociology), in collaboration with co-investigators Linus Chan (UMN Law) and Michele Garnett McKenzie (The Advocates for Human Rights), now wish to apply to become TRAC Fellows in hopes of cross-validating our own court observations data, both in the present and in the future.


• Tianwang Liu (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University)
  David Hao Zhang (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University)
  Do Lawyer and Judge Relationships Affect Case Outcomes?
  How do personal relationships affect outcomes in the legal setting? Using the random assignment of judges in immigration courts, we study the impact of a lawyer and a judge having overlapping education and professional networks on case outcomes, particularly as it relates to discrimination.


• Benjamin Meadows (Ph.D. Candidate, Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
  Charting Undocumented Students Educational Investments Under Threat of Deportation
  For immigrant students lacking documentation of U.S. citizenship, daily school attendance can be risky. From immigration enforcement that occurs at bus stops1 to the general exposure via commuting to school, undocumented students and their families face risks of apprehension (and therefore deportation) just by attending school. This means their daily choice to attend school does not simply involve the costs and benefits to education, but also the risk of apprehension. Using an unique educational panel that allows us to ascertain a student’s documentation status, we compare the differential attendance choices of three subsets of students: undocumented-Hispanic, documented-Hispanic, and documented- non-Hispanic students. We then match these attendance records to a same-county monthly total of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) apprehensions, to estimate the effect of ICE immigration enforcement upon these student subpopulations.


• Armando N. Meier (Postdoctoral Fellow, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago)
  The Impact of Reversals on Judicial Decision-Making
  I want to examine the impact of judicial reversals on judge decision-making. The TRAC data will provide valuable information to study when judicial reversals occur and their corresponding impact.


• Margot C Moinester (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, Harvard University)
  Deportation and Place: Spatial Variation in Noncitizens’ Apprehension Risk within the U.S. Interior
  This project combines analysis of ICE’s interior arrest data and census data with qualitative fieldwork in specific locales to examine spatial variation in noncitizens’ risk of apprehension in the U.S. interior and drivers of this variation. Specific questions I seek to answer are the following: How do apprehension rates and apprehension methods vary within and between ICE Field Offices? What factors drive these differences?


• Margot Moinester (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Harvard University)
  Kaitlyn Stanhope (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Epidemiology, Emory University)
  Protective Immigration Laws and Perinatal Health Outcomes of Immigrant Women
  This project examines the effects of protective immigration laws that authorize undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses on indicators of perinatal health (entry into prenatal care and preterm birth) among Hispanic immigrants. We draw on data from the United States live birth file, 2004-2016, and link these data to state information on driver’s license laws. We plan to conduct a difference in difference analysis, matching states that passed license laws to control states based on a number of factors, including immigration enforcement rates.


• Matthew Nesvet (CRS Research Principal/Univ. of California Lecturer and Doctoral Candidate, CRS (Congress' internal think tank)/Anthropology Dept, Congressional Research Service/University of California)
  Jameson Carter (Research Assistant, Domestic Social Policy Division, Congressional Research Service)
  Effects of Extractive Industry Development on Environmental Health and Public Safety in the United States
  Anthropologists, political scientists, and development scholars have long questioned whether certain kinds of extractive resources and industrial development are linked to social outcomes such as changes in levels of employment, medical/psychological health, and conflict, violence and victimization. This study addresses the relationship between energy resources, extractive development, and health, safety, and violent victimization in the United States and indigenous nations' lands in the intermountain west.


• Emily Owens (Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  John R. Hipp (Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  Charis E. Kubrin (Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  Nancy Rodriquez (Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  Ana Muñiz (Assistant Professor, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  Aida Escobar (Cohort, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  Derek Christopher (Graduate Student, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine)
  Examining the Interaction between Federal Immigration Enforcement and State and Local Crime and Criminal Justice Practices
  This project seeks to explore the ways in which federal immigration enforcement influences, and is influenced by, state and local criminal justice practices. The first component of the proposed research will estimate how federal immigration proceedings, as recorded in TRAC data, are influenced by the State of California’s surveillance of suspected gang members. Since 1998, the State of California has maintained a list of all residents believed by law enforcement agents to be members of criminal gangs, a data set called CalGangs. The specific requirements for inclusion in CalGangs, in practice, are a source of controversy, although it is certainly below the legal standards of conviction of a criminal offense. From 2006 to 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was granted read-only access to this database, meaning that ICE agents had the ability to identify people charged with immigration violations who were also believed by the State of California to be members of criminal gangs. Based on independently collected data on the number of CalGangs entries over time, by county, race, and ethnicity, we will estimate how federal access to local criminal justice records has influenced the length of deportation hearings and deportation outcomes. This will require access to case level data on immigration proceedings, including race and ethnicity of the defendant, along with the defendant’s city of residence at the time that immigration proceedings began. The second component of this project will use variation in ICE field office practices to estimate how immigration enforcement conditions the relationship between immigrant populations, crime, and law enforcement. We propose to use TRAC data to generate field office and month specific estimates of the number of people cited for immigration violations, the number of people transferred to federal custody from local detention centers, and the number of people deported. We will then merge this aggregated data with other crime and criminal justice outcomes, along with estimates of the immigrant population. The goal of this research is to estimate how the intensity with which ICE offices police immigrant communities conditions the relationship between the size of immigrant populations and: (1) crimes known to police (as reported to the Uniform Crime Reports and publicly available data on non-index crimes known to law enforcement agencies, (2) the propensity of crime victims to contact the police (as reported in restricted access versions of the National Crime Victimization Survey, housed in UC-Irvine’s Census Research Data Center (CRDC)).
  Publications:
  Electronic Surveillance in Immigration Court: Evidence from the CalGang Database
  


• Daniel C. Richman (Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law, Law School , Columbia University )
  Dolly Setton (Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University)
  The Art of Discretion: Geographic Disparities in Federal Sentencing
  Against the backdrop of a longstanding debate on the appropriate constraints on judicial discretion in federal sentencing, we are investigating geographic disparities in sentencing after the 2005 Supreme Court decision United States vs Booker, which made the federal sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory. We will look at sentencing patterns from 2005 through 2017 in relation to offense characteristics (e.g., offense type, bodily injury, firearm use, restitution amounts, number of counts), offender characteristics (e.g., citizenship, race/ethnicity, gender, number of dependents), recidivism-related characteristics (e.g., age, criminal history, education); judge characteristics (e.g., party of appointing President, prosecutorial experience); prosecutorial discretion (e.g., mandatory sentences). Using hierarchical nested regression models, single level regression models, and unsupervised clustering techniques, we will consider what the data reveals in terms of district-level, state and regional disparities, and how any disparities may reflect a focal versus ideological perspectives framework and/or discrimination.


• Alexandra Scherf (Doctoral Candidate, Accounting and Management, Harvard Business School)
  Personal financial disclosure and public corruption
  The goal of this project is to assess the impact of personal financial disclosure laws for state-level public officials on public corruption. The study will exploit variation in the staggered adoption of personal financial disclosure laws across states to identify changes in public corruption in response to transparency laws. I will also use information contained within economic interest disclosures to assess whether politically-connected firms or industries benefit from politician ownership or investment.


• Anna Scolese (Graduate Research Assistant, College of Health and Human Services, George Mason University)
  Jhumpa Gupta (Assistant Professor, College of Health and Human Services, George Mason University)
  Joanna Almeida (Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Simmons University)
  The impact of ICE activity on self-reported mental health among Latinos in the general US population (immigrant and non-immigrant)
  Following a steady decline in deportations since 2013, ICE arrests surged 30% in 2017 (143,470 arrested). As such, there has also been an increased focus within public health research on how deportation activity, including fear of deportation, might impact the health of Latino immigrants and non-immigrants. Existing studies have indicated that fear of deportation has been linked with poor mental health in smaller, community-based and/or clinic-based populations. Based on this current state of knowledge, our research seeks to examine how ICE arrests (at the state and county levels) may impact the mental health of Latino populations in the United States (immigrant and non-immigrant). Specifically, we will link the requested TRAC data with state and county level data on mental health from the National Health Interview Survey (a nationally representative, annual survey).


• Alice (Yiqian) Wang (Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science, Stanford University)
  Court-Agency Relations and Judicial Behavior in the U.S. Immigration Courts
  Facing a nationwide backlog of immigration cases, the Trump administration has instituted several reforms to the immigration court system--from limiting administrative closures to imposing annual quotas and performance reviews--designed to combat processing delays. Broadly, this project concerns the politicization of agency adjudications and how/why judicial decision-making changes under conditions of increased agency oversight.


• Li Zhu (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University)
  The Risk of Being Deported: Deportation Prevalence among Unauthorized Immigrants in the U.S.
  Immigration has increasingly become a hotly contested topic in the United States, among which, the deportation of unauthorized immigrants has drawn attention from politicians, the media, as well as the general public. Existing work has focused on the impacts of immigration enforcement on unauthorized immigrants, effects of deportation on native populations, and the coverage of unauthorized immigrants in large surveys. However, despite the importance of this work, there is little baseline evidence on the prevalence of deportation and, specifically, the risk of removal for migrants. In this project, I use synthetic cohort life table methods to estimate the cumulative probability of being deported as an unauthorized immigrant in the U.S. by age 55. I then use the current average length of stay among those who have been deported and those who are still living in the U.S. to estimate alternative cumulative probabilities of deportation, which reveal a more “realistic” picture of the lower- and upper-bound of the likelihood of deportation faced by unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.



2018



• Charlotte Ambrozek (Ph.D. Student, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California Davis)
  Timothy Beatty (Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California Davis)
  Alexandra Hill (Ph.D. Student, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California Davis)
  Immigration Enforcement, Maternal Stress, and Child Birth Weight
  We investigate the hypothesis that increasing federal emphasis on immigration enforcement has an adverse effect on maternal and child health for Hispanic/Latino populations. This argument is in line with literature that documents the effect of immigration enforcement on immigrant family stress and health behaviors, and the increase in adverse maternal/child health outcomes associated with increased maternal stress. We link increases in immigration enforcement activity to incidence of low and very low birthweight. Using a difference-in-differences design, we recover average treatment effects of immigration policy on birthweight outcomes between potentially undocumented Hispanic/Latina mothers and control groups. The paper builds on existing literature by considering both infant outcomes and maternal behaviors across states and over a substantial time horizon.


• Ms Neil Bennett (Student, Economics, University of California, Irvine)
  Understanding Establishment-Level ICE Audits
  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has two primary methods by which to locate and deport undocumented individuals living within the United States: establishment audits and jail audits. Information on ICE's establishment-level audits have, until now, been only available sporadically and in aggregate form. This makes it difficult to assess what instigates them and their importance in ICE's overall domestic operations. I use new data on ICE's work-site audits to evaluate the extent to which Secure Communities, which facilitate jail audits, and local law enforcement impacted the frequency and effectiveness of ICE audits. Evidence suggests that Secure Community roll-out reduces the number of establishment ICE audits in a given county by seven percent, implying that ICE is allocating more of its time and resources on jail audits and less so on establishment audits. Evidence also shows that Secure Community roll-out reduces the number of undocumented individuals found from establishment audits by 11 percent indicating that Secure Communities reduce the efficiency of establishment-level ICE audits. I also test political party heterogeneity by interacting the party affiliation county sheriffs with Secure Communities. Evidence suggests that there is little to no difference in the reduction of establishment audits when the Sheriffs party affiliation is accounted for.
  Publications:
  Essays on Migration and Immigration Policy
  


• Stephanie Holmes Didwania (Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law, Law School, University of Chicago)
  The Role of Political Preferences in Prosecutorial Decision-Making
  This project will seek to examine individual political preferences affect decision-making by (un-elected) prosecutors. I plan to construct a measure of each AUSA's political views derived from publicly-available campaign contribution records and examine the ways in which prosecutors' (inferred) political views seem to influence the decisions that they make in criminal cases.


• Paola Echave (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, The Ohio State University)
  Jasmine Whiteside (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University)
  Jake Tarrence (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University)
  Exploring the Health Status of Immigrants in the US
  Since the beginning of the 21st century, immigration settlement patterns have started to shift and regions of the US that do not have a long history of sustaining immigration growth are now considered popular immigrant destinations. These changes have implications to various aspects of society including health. We use the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine the differences of self-reported health of 213,192 foreign born-individuals across 8 types of immigrant destinations. We find that immigrants living in non-traditional immigrant destinations report better health than immigrants living in historical immigrant destinations. This calls to question whether immigration theories regarding the welfare of immigrant populations in historical immigrant destinations downplay the health benefits that may arise from living in new immigrant destinations. The next step of this project is to examine whether community variation in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removals might explain community variation in immigrant health.


• Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi (Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  Dimitris Bertsimas (Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  A Statistical Learning Approach for Analyzing the Decision-Making Strategies in the Secure Communities Program
  In this study we propose a statistical learning approach to quantitatively analyze each detain/deport decision made under the Secure Communities Program, using individual-level detainer/removal data obtained from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). The proposed approach will allow us to determine the implicit strategies that appear to drive the detain/deport decisions under the program, and to evaluate the adoption of alternative policies.


• Matthew Hall (Associate Professor, Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, Cornell University)
  Frank Edwards (Postdoctoral Associate, Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, Cornell University)
  Immigration Enforcement and Latino Segregation
  Research in economics, demography, and sociology has widely documented the extensive costs of deportations, including lost wages, food insecurity, mental distress, and home foreclosure. This project builds on this work to evaluate how local efforts to deport immigrants altered residential racial segregation patterns across a broad range of US counties, and assesses the extent that any impacts are driven by differential migration or deportation patterns.


• Elisa Jacome (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics, Princeton University)
  The Effect of Immigration Enforcement on Reporting Crime
  This project will analyze whether changes in immigration enforcement unintentionally alter the relationship between Hispanic communities and local law enforcement. Using data from TRAC and from a number of police departments, I will explore how reporting by Hispanic complainants changes relative to reporting by non-Hispanic complainants in the same neighborhood. The project will use changes in federal immigration laws as well as local variation in immigration enforcement to estimate whether Hispanic communities are more or less willing to communicate with the police after the passage of policies or during weeks/months when the number of ICE detainers is particularly high.


• Professor Catherine Y. Kim (George R. Ward Term Professor and Associate Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law, University of North Carolina)
  The Politics of Immigration Adjudication
  This project examines recent efforts to exercise political influence over our nation's immigration courts. Scholars have long documented the expansion of presidential influence over agency decisionmaking. Until recently, such influence was assumed to be limited to agency decisions involving purely executive functions, such as the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, or quasi-legislative functions, such as the issuance of regulations. The current administration has cast doubt on this assumption, however, exercising political control over a form of agency decisionmaking historically viewed as impervious to partisan interference: agency adjudication. This project examines a series of structural, procedural, and managerial reforms instituted by the Trump administration and assesses their impact on case outcomes in removal proceedings. It then explores the normative implications of these developments, and how they alter the contours of the traditional debate over presidential administration.


• Mr Manuel Leiva (Graduate Student, Sociology , Virginia Commonwealth University )
  Victor Chen (Professor, Sociology Department, Virginia Commonwealth University )
  A Sociological Analysis of Federal Immigration Policies in Local Contexts
  This research project seeks to examine the contentious debate surrounding national immigration policy in the United States by studying the cooperation (or lack thereof) between local governments and the federal agencies tasked with enforcing federal immigration policy. We aim to understand what political, economic, and social factors help explain why certain localities work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other adjacent agencies, to identify and detain undocumented immigrants, while others ostensibly resist such cooperation. In exploring the geography of immigration enforcement in the United States, this project aims to contribute to the growing body of literature that seeks to understand the contemporary development of border and immigration enforcement between different scales of government.


• Mr. Domininkas Mockus (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
  Undocumented Immigration and the Living Arrangements of Elderly Natives
  Elderly individuals (those aged 65 and older) express a strong desire to age in place and stay out of nursing homes. Undocumented immigrants, who make up 19% of workers in private households, play an important role in supporting elderly who want to live at home. This paper uses a two-stage least-squares (2SLS) strategy to identify the effect of changes in undocumented immigration on the living arrangements of elderly natives in the US. The instrument exploits the staggered rollout of the Secure Communities (SC) program and the undocumented share of the population beforehand. The SC program was a mandatory federal immigration-enforcement program rolled out county-by-county between 2008 and 2013 that increased the threat of deportation for undocumented immigrants.


• Matthew J Notowidigdo (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Northwestern University)
  The Economic Consequences of Asylum: Evidence from Appeals
  We propose studying some of the economic consequences of asylum by merging Immigration Court data with a variety of other data sources (such as labor market information, criminal records, and credit report data). The goal of the research project is to trace out some of the consequences of these judicial decisions on the individuals filing appeals.


• Dr. Caitlin Patler (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Univeristy of California - Davis)
  Robin Savinar (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of California - Davis)
  Kelsey Meagher (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of California - Davis)
  Eric Hamilton (Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California - Davis)
  Konrad Franco (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Claifornia - Davis)
  Immigrant Rights, Immigration Enforcement, and Community Wellbeing
  This research examines the short- and longer-term impacts of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program among recipients and their communities. Recognizing that the impacts of federal policies may be moderated by local actions, we examine whether DACA’s impacts vary across local geographic areas where immigration enforcement is more or less prevalent.
  Publications:
  The black box within a black box: Solitary confinement practices in a subset of U.S. immigrant detention facilities
  


• Dane R. Thorley (Postdoctoral Fellow in Empirical Law and Economics, Columbia Law School, Columbia University)
  Joshua Mitts (Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School, Columbia University)
  Identifying the Causal Effect of Video Conferencing in the Courtroom: A Replication Utilizing Randomized Court Procedure
  In her 2015 paper, Remote Adjudication in Immigration, Ingrid Eagly explored the potential differences between traditional in-person hearings and remote televideo adjudication by utilizing an unique feature of the United States Immigration Courts—detained respondents are randomly assigned to immigration courts and, due to the geographical variance of those courts, are subsequently more or less likely to have in-person hearings. Eagly’s empirical analysis suggests that respondents who appear before judges via video feed are significantly less likely to engage in the hearing process than those who appear in-person, but that procedural outcomes are ultimately unaffected by the use of digital hearings. While Eagly’s findings are limited to the immigration-court context, they provide novel insights into the effects of a new (but increasingly popular) adjudicatory practice that has the potential of transforming the traditional interaction that legal participants have with courts. Our project is a replication of Eagly’s work that extends her analysis by verifying random assignment and employing a two-stage instrumental variable design that will allows us to identify the unbiased causal effect of video-conferencing in the courtroom context. This replication effort will corroborate Eagly’s efforts and produce additional data that can more reliably be used by courts considering implementing video technology into the court process.


• Jennifer L. Woolard (Associate Professor of Psychology, Adjunct Professor of Law, Department of Psychology, Georgetown University)
  Juvenile and young adult respondents in immigration proceedings: Effects of demography, geography, legal representation, and criminal court involvement on case process and outcome.
  This project will investigate the characteristics of individuals who come before the immigration court, their backgrounds, and the resolution of their cases in the last 4-5 years. Other studies have examined the predictive power of a few demographic, case, and jurisdiction characteristics on case resolution, but at least to date the published literature has focused primarily on those over 18 and only on asylum cases for juveniles. Given the empirical evidence that legally-relevant decisional capacities continue developing throughout adolescence and into young adulthood, the impact of legal representation on case outcome may be particularly salient for these age groups compared to adults. This study will examine the characteristics of cases for which age of respondent is available as well as the overall question regarding attorney representation for all individuals. Focal questions include: (1) How do demographic, case, and jurisdiction characteristics predict case resolution for youth under 18 and young adults ages 18-25, compared to adults ages 26 and older? (2) How does attorney representation status moderate the relationship between demographic, case, and jurisdiction characteristics and case outcomes? Does the predictive power of attorney representation vary by geography? How do geographic variations in immigration case outcomes compare to the literature on justice by geography in juvenile justice? (3) How do the analyses in questions 1 and 2 vary across time?



2017



• Marcella Alsan (Assistant Professor, Medical School, Stanford)
  Crystal Yang (Assistant Professor, Law School, Harvard University)
  The effect of detention and deportations on program take-up and health
  We aim to examine the effect of detentions and deportations on community health and program take-up using a variety of econometric methods. Our aim is to provide a timely, policy relevant evaluation of the effect of such actions on communities and their families.


• Daniel Chen (Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies, Toulouse School of Economics)
  The Manne Law and Economics Program Impact on Sentencing Decisions
  This project provides a quantitative analysis of conservative jurisprudence. We examine the impact of law and economics on decision-making in sentencing decisions. Using the random assignment of judges, we examine if judges who attended the Manne Law and Economics Program make different sentencing decisions.
  Publications:
  Mood and the Malleability of Moral Reasoning
  


• Daniel Chen (Professor, Economics, Toulouse School of Economics)
  Can Machine Learning Help Predict the Outcome of Asylum Adjudications?
  In this study, we analyzed 492,903 asylum hearings from 336 different hearing locations, rendered by 441 unique judges over a thirty-two year period from 1981-2013. We define the problem of asylum adjudication prediction as a binary classification task, and using the random forest method developed by Breiman [2], we predict twenty-seven years of refugee decisions. Using only data available up to the decision date, our model correctly classifies 82 percent of all refugee cases by 2013. Our empirical analysis suggests that decision makers exhibit a fair degree of autocorrelation in their rulings, and extraneous factors such as, news and the local weather may be impacting the fate of an asylum seeker. Surprisingly, granting asylum is predominantly driven by trend features and judicial characteristics- features that may seem unfair- and roughly one third-driven by case information, news events, and court information


• Daniel Chen (Professor, Center for Data Science, New York University )
  Ismail Mustafa (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Sergei Bernstein (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Pavan Sudhir Nallam (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Jess Aaron Eagel (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Akanksha Singh (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Matthew Thomas Dunn (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Benjamin Ulrich Jakubowski (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  Rafael Garcia Cano Da Costa (Student, Center for Data Science, New York University)
  The Processing of BIA Appeals
  To track what actually happens to the final outcome for those whose decisions were affected by the previous decision of the judge and analyses of subsequent decisions and outcomes, and of the hearing sessions themselves.


• Alberto Ciancio (Post Doc, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania)
  Camilo Garcia-Jimeno (Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania)
  An Empirical Investigation of Immigration Enforcement Policy, Social Trust, and Crime
  We develop an empirical model of immigration enforcement to understand how local governments immigration enforcement decisions respond to changes in federal immigration enforcement efforts. We use our empirical strategy to determine: a. The effectiveness of immigration policy to deter crime. b. The importance of community trust for the efficiency of law enforcement. c. The determinants of preferences over immigration policy at local level.
  Publications:
  The Political Economy of Immigration Enforcement Conflect and Cooperation Under Federalism
  


• Isaac Ehrlich (SUNY Distinguished Professor (Research), Economics, University at Buffalo)
  Bibaswan Chatterjee (Ph.D. Candidate, Economics, University at Buffalo)
  Corruption as a crime: investigating the social costs of corruption involving government bureaucrats and private corporations at both the Federal and State levels in the US
  Unlike previous work (e.g., Ehrlich and Lui, 1999), we treat corruption in this project as a crime that can be controlled through law enforcement, but also via private self-protection by potential victims, partly through investment in political. Our model allows the law enforcement authority to play the role of a social planner striving to minimize the social costs of corruption due to misallocation of resources used in the production of public goods and services, or through the denial of consumption opportunities caused by distortion of free trade, domestic or international, by both bureaucrats and corporations. The model also distinguishes between corruption at the federal and state levels. The empirical investigation will focus on explaining the relative incidence of corruption, the size of the bribes involved, and the probability and severity of the criminal sanctions imposed on the commission of acts of corruption at the federal and state jurisdictional levels.


• Adar Eisenbruch (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Harvard University)
  Max Krasnow (Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University)
  The Evolved Psychology of Punishment as a Mechanism for Biological Markets
  Despite the cultural value of impartiality (“justice is blind”), physical features of transgressors frequently influence punishment decisions. For example, more attractive criminal defendants often receive lighter sentences, and murderers who look more trustworthy are less likely to receive the death penalty. This project will test the theory that these phenomena result from a psychology that evolved to maintain and regulate cooperative relationships under ancestral conditions. On this theory, punishment is one mechanism for incentivizing better future treatment by social partners in a competitive partner marketplace. Previous work has found that more valuable cooperative partners both receive better treatment and get away with behaving more selfishly in simple behavioral economic paradigms. But this work has not been applied to the domain of criminal justice. This theory predicts that the likelihood and severity of punishment will be calibrated to both the transgressor’s and punisher’s respective values as a long-term cooperative partner, such that more valuable individuals both receive lighter punishments and give harsher punishments, in response to any given treatment. Furthermore, the cues that establish cooperative partner value are predicted to be those indexing ancestrally-relevant, rather than contemporarily-relevant, aspects of partner value. This hypothesis will be tested using actual criminal sentencing data. We expect that judges who are higher on ancestrally-relevant cues of cooperative partner value will be harsher punishers, on average.


• Dylan Farrell-Bryan (Doctoral Candidate, Sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
  Deportation and Immigration Court: Determinants of Removal and Relief
  Given the increasingly visible use of deportation to manage populations and borders, this project is concerned with the determinants of relief and removal in deportation proceedings in the United States. Which and how many immigrants are in removal hearings, applying for relief from removal, and what are the outcomes of those hearings? More specifically, how do the outcomes for removal hearings vary by language, country of origin, court, region, and representation status? This project uses both ethnographic observations and TRAC data from the Executive Office of Immigration Review to analyze case-level immigration statistics on the content and considerations within case processing and decision-making by immigration judges.
  Publications:
  Who Gets Deported? Immigrant Removal Rates by National Origin and Period, 1998 to 2021
  Agency Entrenchment: Sociological Legitimacy in a Politically Contested Occupatio
  


• John Douglas Gallemore (Assistant Professor, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago )
  Martin Jacob (Professor, Chair of Business Taxation, Otto Beisheim School of Management, WHU)
  The Backup Bank Monitor: The Role of Tax Authorities in Banking Sector Stability
  We plan to examine the interaction between taxing authorities and banking supervisors in the oversight of banks. While both are government agencies, they face very different mandates. The banking supervisor is charged with ensuring the stability of both individual banks and the overall banking sector. This is generally done by ensuring that banks balancing risky lending with greater capitalization and liquid asset holdings. On the other hand, the taxing authority is tasked with collecting all required taxes. Despite their different mandates, it is clear that these two agencies will have overlapping effects on bank behavior. For example, both agencies will likely seek to minimize illegal behavior that jeopardizes both mandates (e.g., the type of actions in the Desai, Dyck, and Zingales (2007) framework that erode shareholder value and lead to tax evasion). Even outside of stopping illegal acts, the act of supervision by one regulator may generally affect the bank’s ability to comply with the other’s mandate, through corporate governance mechanisms such as better managerial oversight and better internal information quality. Furthermore, it could even be the case that weak oversight by one regulator is substituted for by the other. However, it is equally clear that these mandates will sometimes clash. For example, banking regulators may prefer that banks engage in substantial tax planning that leads to greater capitalization and liquid asset holdings, whereas taxing authorities are likely to push back on this behavior. Given their different but overlapping mandates and the impact of banking sector weakness on the greater economy, we believe it is important to understand how their oversight impacts bank performance and soundness. To explore the role of tax authorities in bank performance and soundness, we build on the theory by Desai et al. (2007) that the tax enforcer cab as a monitor of corporate insiders. Prior research suggests that stricter tax enforcement can lead to more transparent information environments by reducing the obfuscation that managers may engage in to hide taxable income (Hanlon, Hoopes, and Shroff 2014; Bauer, Fang, and Pittman 2017). Therefore, stricter tax oversight can lead bank managers to engage in less aggressive tax avoidance and resource diversion, and align incentives with shareholders, through the fear of being caught. However, greater oversight from taxing authorities may lead banks to generally improve their information environments even in the absence of aggressive tax avoidance. For example, if bank managers know that taxing authorities will conduct thorough audits, they may improve loan documentation. The improved loan documentation can lead to better lending decisions through improved credit risk assessments, and can aid risk management’s ability to identify excessive risk exposures. Therefore, tax authorities’ monitoring of financial institutions should lead to more value-increasing decisions being taken and better risk management. Therefore, stricter tax enforcement can lead to greater bank performance and soundness (H1A). However, there is another channel through which stricter tax enforcement can affect banks: their impact on tax collections. Specifically, imposing stricter tax enforcement on banks may have adverse effects because higher effective tax rates reduce after-tax profits, and thus bank capital and liquidity. Lower capital and liquidity ratios are often early warning signs of bank problems, and prior research finds that banks with lower capital ratios were more likely to be targeted by regulatory intervention (Gallemore 2016). Furthermore, these effects can compound over time, with lower liquid assets and equity restricting future loan growth and profitability. Therefore, stricter tax enforcement could actually impair banks’ performance and stability (H1B). Next, we plan to explore the interaction between tax authority oversight and monitoring by bank regulators. First, it could be the case that when regulators are weaker or less diligent, tax authority oversight can provide an important corporate governance mechanism. In this way, tax authorities may act as a substitute for banking regulators in overseeing banks. This suggests that the effect of strict tax enforcement on bank performance and stability should be stronger when bank regulatory oversight is weaker (H2A). On the other hand, prior research suggests that firm information environments are improved when tax enforcement is greater (Hanlon et al. 2014; Bauer et al. 2017). Since both agencies use information (e.g., on-site documentation and off-site reporting) to monitor firms, it could be that strict oversight by both parties leads to improved information environments and corporate governance, increasing each agency’s ability to successful monitor banks. This suggests that tax enforcement and bank regulatory oversight are complements, and that bank performance and stability are greater when strict tax enforcement is combined with strict banking oversight (H2B). Our primary contribution is to provide the first empirical evidence on the role of the tax authority as a monitor of banks, and whether tax authorities are complements or substitutes for banking supervisors. We believe this to be a critical question, as it suggests that tax enforcement may have important externalities on the stability of the financial system, and through it, the overall economy. Furthermore, our research provides evidence on the effects of different but overlapping government agency mandates. Another contribution of our study will be to explore how the tax authority can act as a corporate governance mechanism. Prior research has documented how stronger tax enforcement is associated with lower stock price crash risk (Bauer et al. 2017) and greater financial reporting quality (Hanlon et al. 2014). These studies point to taxing authorities playing a corporate governance role by increasing the quality of the information environment. We plan add to this literature by exploring how taxing authorities may have played a role in bank governance. While we see our bank setting as a laboratory for further exploring the role of the tax authority in corporate governance, bank governance itself is an important topic to understand, because of banks’ critical role in providing capital for individuals and businesses and liquidity for depositors, and because prior research suggests that bank risk-taking affects overall economic stability (Bernanke 1983; Keeley 1990; Calomiris and Mason 2003a, 2003b, 1997).
  Publications:
  Tax Enforcement Externalities and the Banking Sector
  


• Christopher L. Griffin, Jr. (Research Director, The Access to Justice Lab, Law School, Harvard University)
  D. James Greiner (Professor of Public Law, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab, Law School, Harvard University)
  Erika Rickard (Associate Director of Field Research, Law School, Harvard University)
  Massachusetts Immigration Representation RCT
  The Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School is developing a randomized control trial (“RCT”) to evaluate the effectiveness of attorney representation on case outcomes in federal immigration removal proceedings. The field partner in this study is the Committee for Public Counsel Services (“CPCS”), the state public defender agency in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Like other state public defenders, CPCS sees numerous clients in state criminal court whose criminal convictions have collateral consequences in immigration proceedings. Our study will involve the expansion of CPCS direct representation to the removal proceedings themselves. Understanding how effective representation is for these clients takes on added importance when criminal charges are pending and cannot be adjudicated until completion of the federal removal proceedings.


• Edwin Grimsley (Ph.D. Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York)
  Understanding the Connections between Moral Turpitude Offenses for Immigration Deportations and Policing Practices
  From 2011 to 2014, 46% of all deportations in the United States occurred because of a criminal conviction. A sizable portion of these convictions resulted from moral turpitude crimes. Yet, little is known about how these low-level offenses in the immigration court system work and its relationship to policing practices in this country. Given the rise of misdemeanor policing in many urban neighborhoods, most notably in New York City, the rise of deportations for criminal convictions deserves scholarly attention. This study presents the findings of an analysis of moral turpitude crimes in New York City. I analyze twenty-six years of government data (from 1990 to 2016) to provide a descriptive account of both misdemeanor offenses appearing before immigration courts and the relationship to policing practices in New York City neighborhoods.


• Annie Laurie Ely Hines (Graduate Student, Department of Economics, UC Davis )
  Chloe East (Assistant Professor, Department of Ecnomics, University of Colorado Denver)
  Philip Luck (Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Colorado Denver)
  Andrea Velasquez (Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Colorado Denver)
  Hani Mansour (Associate Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Colorado Denver)
  The Effects of Immigration Enforcement on Labor Markets, Crime, and Immigrant Health
  Despite increasing public debate about immigration enforcement, there is little research about the effects of detentions and deportations. While some argue that deporting undocumented immigrants will improve job prospects for low-skill native workers, prior studies show that increases in immigration have generally had positive or null effects on U.S. workers. Thus far, academic research has not analyzed the labor market effects of deportations in a comprehensive manner. This project explores the impact of heightened enforcement on worker employment and wages, as well as the effects on firms in industries that employ a large share of undocumented workers. Because proponents of deportations claim that enforcement targets serious criminals, we also analyze the impact of immigration enforcement on crime rates. Finally, the effects of increases in enforcement on undocumented immigrants and their families are not fully understood. In particular, fear of deportation may lead to high stress levels with negative outcomes, and this fear may also cause undocumented immigrants to bypass health care for themselves or their children.


• Katherine E. Hoffmann (PhD Student, Stern School of Business, New York University)
  Jin U Bak (Student, Center for Data Sciences, New York University)
  Akash Kadel (Student, Center for Data Sciences, New York University)
  Daniel Chen (Center for Data Sciences, New York University)
  Predicting Refugee Asylum Claims Using State Department Cables
  This project explores the extent to which refugee asylum actions correlate with international events, as captured in US diplomatic communications. Specifically, we seek to predict both the incidence of, and judges’ rulings on, affirmative and defensive asylum applications. Data on immigration and customs enforcement detainers issued by region and nationality will be used as both a control on the volume of defensive applications, and a prediction target in and of itself. Successfully predicting these events will help courts and legal aid entities anticipate the volume of future asylum requests, and may be used to counsel refugees on their application’s chance of success. More broadly, the study of the interaction between international current events and domestic immigration decisions may shed light on the ways in which judges are influenced and even biased by the political context of these applications.


• Asya Magazinnik (PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, Princeton)
  Immigration Federalism and Representation
  This project assesses the impact of the recent devolution of immigration policy from the federal government down to the states and municipalities on the democratic representation of citizens, and on the rights of noncitizens. It examines new mechanisms of top-down influence such as the Secure Communities program, as well as the rising power of local jurisdictions to preempt and defy higher levels of government.
  Publications:
  Elective Enforcement: The Politics of Local Immigration Policing
  


• Margot Moinester (Ph.D. Student, Sociology Department, Harvard University)
  Disparities by Nationality in U.S. Immigration Apprehensions, Detentions, and Deportations, 1980-2015
  While the growth in immigration enforcement within the interior of the U.S. over the past several decades has been widely discussed, little is know about changes in inequality in enforcement. This paper begins to fill this gap by focusing on disparities in enforcement by nationality. Combining administrative records of immigration court proceedings and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removals with Census data, I examine how the risks of apprehension, detention and deportation for noncitizens residing in the U.S. are stratified by nationality. I further examine how these risks change over time and link these changes to shifts in federal policy.


• Emily Ryo (Associate Professor of Law & Sociology, Gould School of Law, University of Southern California)
  Jesse Acevedo (Lecturer, Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles)
  Ian Peacock (Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology, University of Southern California)
  Facing Deportation
  This project’s primary goal is to generate theoretically-grounded empirical findings that will promote a richer and more nuanced understanding of the nature of U.S. enforcement policies and their consequences. The project will seek to address two main questions: First, who is apprehended, detained, and deported, and are there any significant differences in these outcomes across ICE field offices, immigration judges, and time periods? Second, why and how to lawyers matter in apprehension, detention, and deportation processes?
  Publications:
  A National Study of Immigration Detention
  Landscape of Immigration Detention
  Beyond the Walls
  Denying Citizenship: Immigration Enforcement and Citizenship Rights in the United States
  Who Gets Deported? Immigrant Removal Rates by National Origin and Period, 1998 to 2021
  


• Holger Spamann (Professor, Harvard Law School, Harvard University)
  Replication of Cho et al., Sleepy Punishers …, Psychological Science (forthcoming 2017)
  The project aims to replicate the analysis of Cho et al. (Psychological Science, forthcoming) out of sample. Cho et al. conducted its analysis of federal sentencing decisions on data provided by the USSC from 1992 through 2003. TRAC has data from 2003-2016, enabling an out of sample check.
  Publications:
  Are Sleep Punishers Really Harsh Punishers?: Comment
  



2016



• Akinloye Akindayomi (Associate Professor, College of Business & Entrepreneurship, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley)
  Hussein Warsame (Associate Professor, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada)
  Mark Anderson (Associate Professor, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary)
  Harun Rashid (Ph.D. Candidate, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary)
  Tax Avoidance, Security Issuances and the Mediator's Role of IRS
  Recent evidence suggests that the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) tax monitoring activities deter corporate tax avoidance. Our study documents additional evidence that the IRS monitoring effect is more pronounced among suspect firms who are more likely to be tax avoiders and that while US firms with foreign operations engage in more corporate tax avoidance, when those firms face increased probability of IRS audit, they are less aggressive in their avoidance activities. We also extend the research into the realm of interim financial reporting and we document that while IRS monitoring and enforcement activities may be curtailing corporate tax avoidance, these audits are encouraging managers to build tax rates slacks in their interim financial statements. In addition to the inadvertent outcome from IRS audits in creating a bias in the interim estimates of annual GAAP ETR, we argue that such managerial slack-building behaviors contribute to the volatility of interim financial reporting in a way synonymous to earnings management effects, and that this could be more costly for investors in the long-run.


• Jay Albanese (Criminologist and Professor, L. Douglas Wilder School of Goverment & Public Affairs, Virgina Commonwealth University)
  Kristine Artello (Assistant Professor, L. Douglas Wilder School of Goverment & Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University)
  The Motives, Methods, and Consequences of Public Corruption
  A mixed methods design will be used examine incidents of public corruption over a period of years to assess reasons for large discrepancies in the incidence of public corruption offenses across jurisdictions, various investigative methods used, the motivations of offenders, and the outcomes and impacts of public corruption cases. This project will produce a typology of public corruption incidents, and make specific recommendations for empirically-driven corruption prevention strategies.
  Publications:
  The Behavior of Corruption: An Empirical typology of Public Corruption by Objective & Method
  Culture of Corruption: Prosecutions, Persistence,and Desistence
  


• Adam Cox (Professor, School of Law, New York University)
  Roy Germano (Professor, School of Law, New York University)
  Understanding Patterns in Immigration Enforcement
  This study will analyze data on ICE detainers issued between 2003 and 2015 to understand patterns in immigration enforcement and their impact on crime rates. We are particularly interested in examining the extent to which geography, public opinion, and policy priorities affect ICE’s decisions to issue detainers. Our study will furthermore seek to understand why some ICE field offices focus more resources on serious criminal offenders and if those efforts lead to observable reductions in crime.


• Brett Curry (Professor, Political Science and International Studies, Georgia Southern University)
  Banks Miller (Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Texas at Dallas)
  Exploring the Responsiveness of United States Attorneys
  We see to better understand the behavior of United States Attorneys (USAs), and we will use well-known principal/agent approaches to ask questions such as: how responsive are USAs to the local contexts of their districts? How responsive are USAs to various, potentially competing, principals including the executive, legislative, and judicial branches? Finally, we wish to better understand how the personal incentives of the USAs, including their own ideological predilections and career objectives, influence their behavior.


• Danielle Drory (Student, Law and Economics, Vanderbilt University)
  Crisis of Counsel: Representation in Juvenile Immigration Proceedings
  In sworn testimony, a longtime immigration judge stated that 3- and 4-year-olds can learn immigration law well enough to represent themselves in court. Recently, immigrant advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the government challenging the government’s failure to provide immigrant children facing deportation with taxpayer-funded attorneys in their deportation hearings. To determine if representation matters in juvenile proceedings, I examine the outcomes of juveniles in immigration proceedings by their type of representation. I segment the population of juvenile cases by demographic characteristics, region, and judge variables. I also determine whether the timing of representation matters by examining the length of representation and the proximity of the date of attorney entry to the final case closure date. This comprehensive study on how representation affects juvenile outcomes in immigration proceedings should inform policymakers when evaluating juvenile rights to counsel.
  Publications:
  Immigration Federalism Renewed: The effects of State and Local Policies on the Legal and Labor Market Outcomes of the U.S. Immigrant Population
  


• Katherine K. Grooms (Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Business, Southwestern University)
  Criminal punishment, compliance, and the Clean Water Act
  This paper addresses the effect of punishment, measured by criminal prosecution and conviction for violation of environmental law, on compliance with the Clean Water Act at the judicial district level. I use regression analysis to isolate the causal effect of criminal prosecution on environmental compliance using lagged convictions data and data on violations of the CWA. I will also explore heterogeneity in the effect by judicial stage including referral, prosecution and conviction.


• Lindsey C. Herbel (PhD Candidate , Department of Political Science , Georgia State University )
  The Effects of Ideology and Politics in Prosecutorial Decision Making: The Myth of Apolitical of U.S. Attorneys
  How do federal prosecutors decide which cases to pursue and which punishments to recommend? Federal prosecutors wield enormous power. There is no effective legal check to police the manner in which prosecutors exercise their authority. 95 percent of cases never make it to the court room; instead federal prosecutors alone dictate which criminal charges to bring and what punishments to levy. Despite their power and influence, we lack an effective model to explain how prosecutors make decisions. For decades legal scholars have focused disproportionately on judicial decision making; explaining how judges decide cases and the relative weight that law, politics, and values play in their decision making. What is missing is an accounting of how cases get to court in the first place. Federal prosecutors are crucial in determining this, which leads to several important questions. What factors constrain federal prosecutors? What makes them decide to take some of the accused to trial while pleading others out? More specifically, do the values of a federal prosecutor matter the same way they do for judicial decision making? While some scholars are beginning to turn their attention to how prosecutors behave, legal scholars have virtually ignored the subject. The aim of this project is to provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical examination of the impact that ideology has on prosecutorial decision making.


• Linda Camp Keith (Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Texas at Dallas)
  Banks Miller (Associate Professor, School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas)
  Marlene Campos (Student, International Political Economy, University of Texas at DAllas)
  Unaccompanied Minors and Immigration Judge Decision Making
  Asylum decisions clearly represent the most significant set of cases before any immigration judge (IJ); they trigger salient policy issues and strong normative concerns. Thus, scholars have paid increased attention to immigration judges (IJs), their decision making process, and case outcomes in regard to asylum cases (see for example, Ramji-Nogales et al. 2009; Keith, Miller, and Holmes 2013; Miller, Keith and Holmes 2015). In the past decade, cases of unaccompanied children (UACs) have become a highly salient area of concern in immigration courts, as waves of children have fled to the US as gang violence and murder rates have soared and poverty rates have deepened in Mexico and the Northern Triangle states. The Legal Aid Justice Center reports that over 140,000 unaccompanied children have traveled to the US since 2014, with 43,000 UACs caught crossing the border illegally since the beginning of this fiscal year (Associate Press 2016). The EOIR reported this month that the immigration court system’s backlog has surpassed half a million pending cases (Human Rights First 2016), much of this increase is due to large numbers (200,000) of UACs, as well as families, fleeing Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador since 2011 (Associate Press 2016). UAC cases have raised significant normative concerns in regard to due process and the long term well-being of these children. While UACs have been placed on a “priority docket” created by the DOJ, the children on average still wait a 1071 days for their first hearing (Pierce 2015), despite the requirement that their first hearing be within 21 days. More importantly, significant disparities have been reported across UAC cases. The most important factor seems to be whether the child has legal representation—children without legal representation are five to ten times more likely to be deported (Pierce 2015 and the Legal Aid Justice Center, respectively). The other notable contributor to this disparity is the immigration judge making the decision and the immigration court in which the hearings occur. This disparity fits the above literature on asylum adjudications; however, in many courts, a single judge on an immigration court may be designated as the only judge to hear UAC cases, for example, in Illinois and Texas). Thus, a single judge may have a rather disproportionate effect. In the Dallas court, IJ Deitrich Sims, who has one of the highest denial rates in the country, was replaced by another IJ (Michael Baird) after numerous complaints were filed against Sims in regard to how he had handled these cases (Solis 2014). We believe that these cases represent an important opportunity to examine further IJ decision making, particularly as in these cases the IJ exercises the equivalent of “prosecutorial discretion” (Pierce 2015), and furthermore these cases trigger many of institutional and contextual factors that we have discovered to influence IJ decisions, and we expect that they are likely do so in a more exaggerated manner, given the additional strain these cases places on IJ workload and the long term financial costs these children place on local communities. Thus, we will extend our cognitive model to UAC hearings before IJs, and examine the role of IJ policy predispositions and gender. We will extend our local context models and examine the local conditions identified in that work, with special attention to the concentration of foreign born population and the economic burden these children have placed on local school systems. In addition, we will examine the effect of country of origin conditions: crime and homicide rates, the level of gang violence, and poverty rates.


• Banks P. Miller (Associate Professor, School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas)
  Ben J. Newman (Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut)
  Prosecutorial Discretion and ICE Prosecutors
  Although there is an extensive literature exploring the effect of context on citizens' opinions toward immigration, much less work investigates whether context influences the behavior of political elites, especially those in the immigration justice system. Using case-level data, we explore the determinants of prosecutorial discretion by ICE attorneys.


• Jeff Milyo (Professor, Economics, University of Missouri)
  An Analysis of the Causes and Consequences of Public Corruption in the United States
  An empirical examination of the causes and consequences of public corruption. The analysis focuses on institutional determinants of corruption, the efficacy of reform efforts and the implications for improving governance and economic performance.


• Margot Moinester (Ph.D. Student, Sociology, Harvard University)
  The Devolution of Immigration Enforcement and Policy: Documenting and Explaining State-Level Variation in Detention Rates
  The growing trend of state and local-level policymaking for undocumented immigrants in the USA since the passage of the federal Illegal Immigrant Responsibility and Immigration Act (IIRIR) in 1996 raises some important questions. While states and localities have moved in different directions in terms of policy liberalism or restrictionism toward undocumented immigrants, this paper considers whether a patchwork of quilt-like immigration policies across the country is acceptable.
  Publications:
  Beyond the Border and Into the Heartland: Spatial Patterning of U.S. Immigration Detention
  


• Paolo Pinotti (Professor, Economics, Bocconi University)
  Nicola Gennaioli (Professor, Department of Economics, Bocconi University)
  Matteo Courthoud (Student, Department of Econonics, Bocconi University)
  Corruption and Business Cycles
  The research project studies the relationship between business cycles and corruption. The TRAC data on actual corruption cases and official corruption prosecutions would be an essential input into the analysis. In particular, we would need to access the microdata on each individual corruption-related felony, including the corresponding US state, the filing and prosecution date (month/day/year), and the outcome of the prosecution. The purpose is to study the relationship between business cycles and actual/perceived corruption.


• Steven Justin Shafer (Affiliated Resercher, Empirical Legal Studies Group, UCLA School of Law)
  Family Immigration Detention
  Abstract: In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) opened the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. With a bed capacity of 2,400, the South Texas Family Residential Center is the by far largest family detention facility in the United States. Despite the size of the facility, a systematic study of how many families pass through the gates of Dilley and how long they stay has yet to be explored. This project will analyze DHS detention data obtained by TRAC using the Freedom of Information Act to understand how the detention of women and children functions in practice.


• Crystal S. Yang (Assistant Professor, Law School, Harvard University)
  Marit Rehavi (Assistant Professor, Vancouver School of Economics, The University of British Columbia)
  Catherine Van der List (Ph.D. Student, Vancouver School of Ecnomics, The University of British Columbia)
  Federal Prosecutors and Case Processing
  Prosecutors are one of, if not the, most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. They have discretion over which cases they pursue and how those cases are charged. Yet, unlike federal judges whose decisions take place in the public glare of open court, are scrutinized by both appellate courts, and evaluated relative to established guidelines by bodies such as the US Sentencing Commission, prosecutors’ decision-making is largely a black box. As a result, there is no systematic evidence or analysis documenting how much individual prosecutors’ exercise of discretion actually affects defendants. This project explores how having a second pair of eyes on a case affects charging and sentencing outcomes. Using new data linking federal cases to the entire sequence of prosecutors assigned to each case, we compare outcomes in cases where the same prosecutor handles the case from filing to disposition to cases where due to plausibly exogenous departures from the office, a second prosecutor handles the case between filing and disposition.


• Crystal Yang (Ph.D., J.D., Law School, The University of Chicago )
  An Analysis of Prosecutorial Charging
  This project is aimed at describing and analyzing prosecutorial charging behavior using TRAC charge data. In particular, the project will explore the types of charges that prosecutors bring, and the timeline in which prosecutors charge mandatory minimums, and bring superseding indictments. I will also explore whether prosecutorial charging strategies differ across crime types, defendant types, and sentencing judges using combined data on charging and sentencing.



2015



• Jamie Bologna (Assistant Professor, College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University)
  Executive Influence over Federal Corruption Convictions: Are Conviction Rates a Biased Measure of US State-Level Corruption?
  Using state-level data on corruption convictions, congressional oversight, and political importance over five consecutive presidential terms from 1993-2012, this paper finds evidence that executive influence is an important determinant of federal corruption onvictions in each state. Congressional influence only seems to be important when committee members are part of the president’s political party or when there is little political competition in the state. The evidence suggests that corruption conviction rates are higher in politically important states. Further, this effect decreases in magnitude when states have a governor of the same political party as the president. Importantly, this effect is specific to corruption convictions. When comparing the effect of political influence on corruption convictions with corruption perception measures, exactly the opposite pattern emerges. Taken to its extreme, this could mean that more corruption convictions imply less corruption. However, in the very least, evidence suggests that corruption in politically important states tends to be overstated, and likewise understated in less politically important states, when using corruption conviction rates as the measure of corruption.
  Publications:
  CORRUPTION, PRODUCT MARKET COMPETITION, AND INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE U.S. STATES
  


• Beth Caldwell (Associate Professor, Law School, Southwestern)
  Deportation in Mexico
  Specifically, I would like to determine how many people have been deported due to aggravated felonies in the past ten years. Data I have reviewed from ICE seems to conflate all “criminal aliens” together, but I would like to try to identify more specifics about people deported under the aggravated felony ground, including the crime for which they are deported, the length of time they had spent in the United States prior to their deportation, whether they were lawful permanent residents prior to their deportations, and whether they have U.S. citizen family members. I am operating under the hypothesis that people deported as aggravated felons generally have stronger ties to the United States since they are categorically ineligible for cancellation of removal. I am interested in any information that could help me analyze whether this seems to be the case. In addition, I would be interested in any information about whether all removed or returned individuals had previously served in the U.S. military, and any information about whether removed or returned individuals had American citizen or Lawful Permanent Resident spouses or children. The dates for this research would be October 2015 through August 2016.


• Trung Thi Hoai Nguyen (PH.D. Student, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University)
  Government Regulation and White Collar Crime
  Gary Becker (1974) models the rationality of crime and shows how crimes occur when the gains exceed enforcement penalties. Since the the cost of being caught for criminal activities decreases with the intensity of regulatory scrutiny, regulators play a crucial role in preventing criminal activities. This study seeks to understand the role of regulators and their lack of enforcement activities on the prevalence of white-collar crime and financial fraud in the period leading up to the financial crisis. There are three main questions that I explore. First, is the FBI more likely to focus its investigative activities on firms that are geographically closer? Second, did the FBI significantly reduce prosecution of white-collar crime after 9/11/2001? Third, I examine white-collar crime’s respond to the FBI’s prosecution, or lack thereof.


• Keith Malone (Professor, College of Business, University of North Alabama)
  Examining Internal Immigration Enforcement Patterns in U.S. States
  Over the past several years, and more recently with Presidential executive action and campaigns during the current election cycle, illegal immigration and the number of illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States has become a topic of discussion for citizens and policy makers alike. Illegal immigration fosters a wide range of conversations and disputes from building a border wall to questioning seemingly lax enforcement efforts and a proper course of action to successfully manage the current illegal immigrant population. The focus of this research is to investigate potential connections between political interests and internal immigration enforcement patterns in the United States. Specifically, through this research, we apply interest-group theory of government and various economic characteristics of the states in an attempt to explain variations in internal illegal immigration enforcement activity between states, as measured by deportation proceedings. The goal of our research is to determine if government agencies charged with enforcement responsibilities follow the law or political interests. Our findings indicate that pressure groups shape the pattern of enforcement.


• Sean Mussenden (Captial News Service Digital Bureau Director, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland)
  Deborah Nelson (Associate Professor, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland)
  Human Trafficking
  We will be investigating human trafficking, locally and nationally, through data analysis, field reporting, court records and case studies. As part of that, we want to track trends in federal prosecution from 2004 to 2013. This is a collaborative project in three journalism classes at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. We will share our findings with the public on a website hosted at CNSMaryland.org, a news organization run by the college.


• Talia Shiff (PhD Student, Sociology, Northwestern University)
  A Critical History of Deportation Reliefs: Competing Notions of Membership and Illegality
  The overarching question motivating this research is how categories of persons construed as deserving of legal inclusion have been defined in the context of U.S. immigration law. More specifically, this thesis sets to examine changes in statutory provisions providing relief from deportation to unauthorized immigrants in the United States. It explores how consecutive legal and administrative changes introduced since the Refugee Act of 1980 – in particular the incorporation of a new provision expanding the right of asylum relief to unauthorized immigrants – fueled a shift in how classes of persons deserving of legal inclusion came to be defined in U.S. law and political discourse.


• Crystal Yang (Associate Professor, Law School, Harvard University)
  Alma Cohen (Associate Professor, Law School, Harvard University)
  Judicial Politics and Disparities in Sentencing
  Racial and gender disparities are prevalent in the criminal justice system. In this paper, we explore a potential source of these disparities: judge political affiliation. Using rich data on approximately half a million federal defendants sentenced between 1999 and 2015 linked to sentencing judge, we find that Republican appointed judges sentence black defendants to longer prison terms than similar whites compared to Democratic appointed judges, approximately half of the racial sentence gap. Republican judges also sentence female defendants to fewer months than similar male defendants compared to Democratic judges, roughly one-third the gender sentence gap. Differences in racial disparities by political affiliation increase when judges are granted more discretion, suggesting that they reflect judge preferences. We also find that the sentencing patterns of judges of both political parties change when a court is comprised of more Republican judges, indicating the presence of peer effects.
  Publications:
  Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions
  



2014



• Jennifer M. Chacon (Professor of Law, Law School, University of California, Irvine)
  Christina Tsou (Research Librarian, Law School, University of California, Irvine)
  Tensions and Trade-Offs: Protecting Trafficking Victims in the Era of Immigration Enforcement
  This project is gathering data on human trafficking prosecutions in the period from January 2009 – December 2013 brought under 18 USC sections 1581, 1584, 1589, 1590, 1591, and 1592. For each case that was prosecuted in the U.S. during those years and under those statutes, we are interested in finding the case citation, a brief summary of the alleged facts that formed the basis of the prosecution, a description of any characteristics of the defendant that are contained in the decision (gender, age, race, national origin, citizenship status, and/or any other descriptive information that the case provides), comparable information about the alleged victim(s), as well as information concerning the disposition of the case.


• Linus Chan (Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Law School, University of Minnesota)
  Christopher Uggen (Distinguished McKnight Professor, Sociology and Law, University of Minnesota)
  Coercive Effect of Immigration Detention on Relief and Appeal Rights
  With the implementation of mandatory detention, or a bond system that does not have a default of release, each and every detainee needs to decide how long they are will to be in jail before they have their claim for relief heard, or whether to file a relief claim at all. This empirical study seeks to document the “cost” for many legal permanent residents to pursue their claim to stay in the United States, and what factors may play a role in those decisions.


• Linus Chan (Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Law School, University of Minnesota)
  Investigative Journalism and Public Corruption
  I estimate the average impact that a newspaper has on public corruption convictions at the local, state, and federal levels in the United States. I am able to identify the causal effect by using newspaper entry and exit decisions, which are unlikely to be caused by or be highly correlated with omitted variables affecting corruption convictions (after controlling for state and year fixed effects). Furthermore, assuming that the stock of corrupt officials is slower to adjust following a subtle policy change than the probability of detection, I can attribute most of the observed impact to changes in detection itself, holding corruption levels constant.


• Adriana Cordis (Assistant Professor, Accounting, Finance and Economics Department, Winthrop University)
  An Analysis of Corporate Fraud Cases in the United States
  The U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 following a series of high-profile corporate scandals, thereby raising the visibility of corporate fraud as a serious ethical and legal issue. In this paper, I examine the geographical distribution of corporate fraud cases in the United States, and analyze the lead charges brought by prosecutors in order to determine the most frequent types of corporate fraud observed across states. I also investigate the impact of state-level labor and employment laws on the frequency of corporate fraud convictions in an effort to provide insights on the kinds of policies that are most likely to be effective in deterring fraud.


• Allison Davenport (J.D., Law School, University of California, Berkeley)
  Lydia Anderson-Dana (Legal Intern, Law School, University of California, Berkeley)
  Elisse Larouche (Legal Intern, Law School, University of California, Berkeley)
  Estalyn Marquis (Legal Intern, Law School, University of California, Berkeley)
  The TRUST Act: An Assessment of the First Year of Implementation
  The International Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) is conducting research as part of a project assessing the implementation of the TRUST Act (AB 4) in its first year in California and identifying the advances and gaps in implementation around the state. The results of the research as well as recommendations more thorough and consistent implementation will be documented in a final report, published just after the one-year anniversary of implementation. The TRUST Act (AB 4), signed in to law on October 5, 2013, has made California a leader in pushing back against the wave of enforcement by narrowing the categories of immigrants that can be held by local law enforcement agencies at ICE's request. The TRUST Act, which went in to force on January 1 2014, sets a minimum standard across the state to limit immigration "hold" requests in local jails but is being unevenly implemented at the local level. The project team is in the midst of compiling and analyzing data collected by project partners regarding violations and also conducting research regarding local law enforcement policies and practices, particularly in those counties where little data has been collected. Research includes interviews with advocates, law enforcement officials, immigration officials, and formerly detained non-citizens. The team has submitted public records requests to county sheriffs across the state and is using the limited, publically available data from federal agencies. Upon completion of research, a report summarizing findings, identifying patterns of both the lack of implementation and best practices, and making recommendations to strengthen implementation will be released.


• Ingrid V. Eagly (Professor, School of Law, UCLA)
  Steven Shafer (J.D., School of Law, UCLA)
  Jana Whalley (Student, School of Law, UCLA)
  Immigration Courts and the Detention of Immigrant Families
  The United States currently detains more migrant families than any nation in the world. These families - mothers and their children - are held in prisons and prison-like detention centers upon their arrest at the United States border. Many detained families are seeking asylum based on a fear of persecution of torture. Yet, little is known about how these detained families are treated in the immigration court system and the barriers they face in pursuing their asylum claims. This Article presents the findings of the first national study of families subjected to detention while seeking asylum in the United States. In it, we analyze fifteen years of government data (from 2001 to 2016) to provide a descriptive account of both the families appearing before immigration courts and the decisions judges are making about their cases.
  Publications:
  Detaining Families: A Study of Asylum Adjudication in Family Detention
  


• Ingrid Eagly (Professor, Law School, University of California, Los Angeles)
  Steven Shafer (Law School, University of California, Los Angeles)
  A National Study of Access to Counsel in Immigration Court
  Central to the emerging debate over expanding access to counsel for poor immigrants facing possible deportation are assumptions about the availability of counsel and the relationship of attorney representation to case resolution. Yet, at the national level, surprisingly little is known about the current level of immigrant representation, the institutions that are providing immigration representation, and the impact of representation on case outcomes and court efficiency. This Article, which draws on an extensive dataset of over 1.2 million deportation cases decided by immigration judges between 2007 and 2012, presents the results of the first national study of attorney representation in United States immigration courts. The study’s findings amplify recent regional efforts to study patterns in access to counsel, while adding a valuable national perspective to inform the ongoing conversation regarding how best to increase attorney involvement in immigration court. See journal article for findings from this research.


• Roman Ferrali (Doctoral Candidate, Department of Politics, Princeton University)
  The Organizational Determinants of Bureaucratic Corruption
  How does the organizational structure of a bureaucracy impact the extent of corruption? I also rely on an objective corruption measure, the data on the prosecution of federal corruption cases by US federal attorneys. I also use aggregated American federal personnel records on approximately 900,000 employees annually for 24 years to reconstitute the structure of each local branch of the US federal administration. I investigate four hypotheses related to network analysis: (1) are branches that are characterized by denser social networks less prone to corruption? (2) Are branches that are characterized by more strong ties more prone to corruption? (3) Are branches that are characterized by flatter hierarchies less prone to corruption? (4) Do increases in the probability of detection result into larger corruption rings?


• Sterling Horne (Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania)
  Robert P. Inman (Professor, What Business School, University of Pennsylvania)
  Corruption and the Cost of Governance
  We use variation in corruption convictions due to changes in state-level enforcement policies to measure the impact that public corruption has on administrative costs in state governments. We think about state legislatures as being primarily responsible for delivering services to state residents. The services delivered come at some administrative cost. Corruption has the potential to either increase the costs of administration or decrease output, either of which can result in reduced efficiency. This project's primary aim is to estimate the magnitude of the reduction to efficiency and investigate potential policy solutions.


• Sterling Horne (Doctoral Candidate, Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania)
  Investigative Journalism and Public Corrupton
  I estimate the average impact that a newspaper has on public corruption convictions at the local, state, and federal levels in the United States. I am able to identify the causal effect by using newspaper entry and exit decisions, which are unlikely to be caused by or be highly correlated with omitted variables affecting corruption convictions (after controlling for state and year fixed effects). Furthermore, assuming that the stock of corrupt officials is slower to adjust following a subtle policy change than the probability of detection, I can attribute most of the observed impact to changes in detection itself, holding corruption levels constant.


• Dongjae Jung (Doctoral Candidate, Public Adminstration and Policy, Arizona State Univerity)
  The Federal-Local Nexus in Immigration Enforcement Policy: An Evaluation of the Secure Communities Program
  This study analyzes how current U.S. immigration enforcement policy has been carried out, specifically under the implementation of the Secure Communities (S-Comm) program. Paying special attention to the enforcement-only policy hysteria and immigration patchwork trend since the 2000s, this study has the following research questions: (1) whether S-Comm has faithfully implemented enforcement actions for removing "dangerous" criminal noncitizens; (2) how counties with different immigration perspectives have responded to such an immigration enforcement program; and (3) whether the implementation of S-Comm has really made local communities safer as in the program goal.


• Michael T. Light (Assistant Profssor, Sociology, Purdue University)
  Judicial Tenure, Political Ideology and Criminal Court Decision-Making
  Despite a wealth of scholarship on judicial behavior and considerable debate on the selection, tenure, and ideology of federal judges, there remains a conspicuous dearth of empirical research on: A) the role of political ideology in punishment decisions and B) changes in sentencing behaviors over the course of judicial careers. These omissions are particularly glaring given that in any given year a federal District Court judge adjudicates approximately 130 criminal felonies, and the average tenure for a sitting federal judge is over 15 years. Thus, district judges are likely to punish thousands of offenders during their time on the bench. Yet, basic questions about the judge-level determinants of sentencing decisions over time remain unanswered. This project takes a step towards filling this gap by asking three related questions: 1) Does political ideology impact judicial sentencing behavior? 2) How do the sentencing behaviors of judges change over time? 3) Does the impact of political ideology on judicial behavior change over time?


• Lauren Mattioli (Ph.D. Student, Department of Politics, Princeton University)
  Governing the Federal Judicial State
  This project focuses on the executive institutions of judicial appointments and legal advocacy within the federal judicial system. Examination of prosecutorial decisions and case outcomes across federal districts, gathered from TRAC data, will be used to describe the extent and conditions of presidential influence within the judiciary. Whether, how, and when the executive moves legal policy towards his most preferred outcome is the objective of this research program.


• Emma Beth McGinty (Assistant Professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health, John Hopkins University)
  Daniel W. Webster (Professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health, John Hopkins University)
  Frank C. Curriero (Associate Professor, Bloomberg School of Public Health, John Hopkins Univerity)
  Seema Chomsky (Student, Bloomberg School of Public Health, John Hopkins University)
  Evaluating the Effects of Law Enforcement Actions to Combat Illegal Drugs and Guns on Violent Crime
  The goal of the proposed study is to assess the impact of law enforcement efforts to combat the sale of illegal drugs on violent crime in Baltimore. For decades, law enforcement and elected officials have invested enormous resources combatting the sale of illegal drugs in Baltimore, in part as a strategy to combat violent crime. However, there is little evidence that these strategies have been successful, nor has there ever been an independent scientific study to assess whether current approaches are effective in combatting violence.


• David Miller (Professor, Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath)
  Tom Mills (School of Languages and Social Sciences, Ashton University)
  Understanding and Explaining Terrorism: Expertise in Practice
  The aim of the project is to understand the social production, use and impact of terrorism 'expertise'; how and why it differs across selected domains and to assess why 'evidence based' approaches are not always the most intensively utilised. The specific objectives of the project are: To determine and analyse the processes of knowledge production particular to this field of knowledge; To determine the funding regime which supports the production of 'terrorism' knowledge in the public sector and in the world of think tanks and the private sector; To examine how knowledge claims around terrorism are subject to scrutiny and forms of peer review in a variety of domains; To examine how academic and government knowledge on terrorism is communicated to policy-relevant, academic and public audiences (what are the processes of dissemination particular to this field of knowledge); To examine and ascertain the relationship between counter-terrorism practice (intelligence gathering, evidence-based policy and strategy etc.) and academic knowledge generation and dissemination; To produce guidance for both policymakers and media professionals on the use of terrorism knowledge.


• Travis Wiseman (Assistant Clilnical Professor, College of Business, Mississippi State University)
  A Spatial Study of US Shadow Economies and Corruption
  This paper investigates the spatial dynamics of shadow economies, corruption, and the corruption-shadow economy relationship using new estimates of U.S. state-level shadow economy size, and detailed data on corruption convictions of U.S. public officials from TRACfed. The analysis will consider the corruption-shadow economy relationship as it relates to various types of corruption.



2013



• Gabrielle S. Adams (Assistant Professor, , London Business School)
  Stefan Thau (Professor, , London Business School)
  Madan Pillutla (Professor, , London Business School)
  The Influence of the Gender of a Judge on Sentencing Decisions
  Abstract not yet available.


• Philip R. Campante (Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
  Quoc-Anh Do (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, SciencesPo)
  Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from US States
  We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability, and in contrast with the alternative hypothesis that it might forestall political capture. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different accountability mechanisms over state politics: newspaper coverage, voter knowledge and information, and turnout. We also find evidence against the capture hypothesis: isolated capitals are associated with more money in state-level campaigns. Finally, we show that isolation is linked with worse public good provision.


• Daniel Chen (Professor, , ETH Zurick)
  Tobias J. Moskowitz (Professor, School of Business, University of Chicago Booth)
  Kelly Shue (Professor, School of Business, University of Chicago Booth)
  Cold-Hand Decision Making
  When decision makers review many cases, how might they be biased by the desire to be fair or appear fair? A large body of work suggests social preferences are driven, in part, through social audience or self-image. Using four datasets, we test for cold-hand decision-making by asylum officers and other decision makers and explore factors that ameliorate or exacerbate this potential cognitive bias. Namely, we test for behavior consistent with the belief that if previous decisions are called in one direction by the decision maker, future decisions have a greater chance of being called in the opposite direction. We also explore manipulation in terms of the overall sequence of favorable vs. unfavorable decisions.


• Daniel Chen (Professor, , ETH Zurich)
  Holger Spamann (Professor, Law School, Harvard University)
  Erica Larson (Law School, Harvard University)
  Detecting Extraneous Factors in Judging Using Intra-Judge Variation
  We test the claim that purely personal, non-normative concerns ("what the judge ate for breakfast") may influence judicial decision-making. We link asylum grant rates in US immigration courts to data on the success of the local professional or college sports team on the night preceding the decision. A critical assumption for our test is that sports outcomes are orthogonal to the merits of (asylum) cases. Even if hearing schedules took into account sports schedules (e.g., "big games"), we could eliminate any resulting bias by looking not at sports outcomes per se but deviations from expected outcomes. Another concern is if asylum litigants' behavior changes as a result of sport games outcomes. We will therefore link judges to sports teams of their native or university towns, which is more likely to be exogenous to asylum litigants' behavior.


• Nina Rabin (Associate Clinical Professor, Director, Bacon Immigration Law and Policy Program, College of Law, University of Arizona)
  Prosecutorial Discretion and Bureaucratic Culture in the U.S. Immigration System
  Since 2010, the Obama Administration has attempted to encourage the use of prosecutorial discretion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the executive agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) charged with enforcement of immigration laws. This effort has been widely decried as ineffectual. Statistics reflect a disappointing number of cases closed pursuant to the program, and advocates and scholars have reported widely on cases that demonstrate the agency's failure to embrace its stated goals. My research seeks to document the key role of criminal convictions in ICE agents' decision making process, which is a central reason for the failure of the prosecutorial discretion initiative to take hold. I will demonstrate in two ways the agency's heavy reliance on criminal convictions as a key metric for case processing determinations. The first is a case study of a client of the University of Arizona's Immigration Clinic, who appeared to be a quintessential recipient of prosecutorial discretion, and yet ICE subjected her to two years of detention and aggressive prosecutorial tactics due to a single conviction for which she received probation only. The second is an analysis of data obtained through TRAC of all cases closed pursuant to prosecutorial discretion, which I will analyze to determine the proportion of cases closed that involve criminal convictions of any kind. Building on this data, I will argue that one key reason that prosecutorial discretion has not taken hold within ICE is the failure of the executive branch to adequately account for the powerful role of agency culture. Prosecutorial discretion, particularly of the kind that is intended by the ICE directives, requires agents to draw on internal, often informal, forms of regulation to decide whether to proceed on an individual case. In ICE's case, all these internal cues point in the direction of enforcement when an immigrant has a criminal conviction, regardless of its seriousness. This heavy reliance on convictions directly contradicts the prosecutorial discretion initiative, which was undertaken in part to respond to concerns that ICE was focusing its enforcement efforts on immigrants with non-serious, misdemeanor convictions.



2012



• Adriana S. Cordis (Assistant Professor, Accounting, Finance and Economics Department, University of South Carolina Upstate)
  Jeffrey D. Milyo (Professor, Department of Economics, University of Missouri)
  An Analysis of the Causes and Consequences of Corruption in Federal Programs
  Prior research finds that federal expenditures on state-level programs tend to exacerbate public corruption by increasing opportunities for fraudulent appropriation. In this study, we plan to examine the relation between public corruption and various categories of government expenditures. We are interested in both the impact of expenditures on corruption, and the potential for corruption to alter the pattern of expenditures. One area of particular interest is the relation between federal expenditures for disaster relief and corruption. Most of the disaster relief expenditures are either distributed by FEMA directly to affected individuals, or distributed by funneling funds through state and local government agencies. Several types of assistance could be made available to individuals, businesses and the public after a major disaster. For example, state and local governments are eligible to receive financial and technical assistance from FEMA in the form of grants for emergency protective measures, repair, or restoration of damaged facilities. Qualified individuals and businesses are eligible to receive assistance from the SBA in the form of low interest loans, and households may receive food stamps through the Food and Nutrition Service of the USDA. We obtain state-level data on the number of disaster declarations and government expenditures from the Public Entity Risk Institute and the U.S. Census. Our measures of corruption include the number of prosecutions and convictions per capita for corruption at the federal, state and local levels, and the number of prosecutions and convictions per capita for corruption at the federal agency-level. To examine whether disaster aid expenditures have any impact on public corruption we estimate ordinary least squares regressions that include state and year fixed effects. We also control for other state characteristics that are known to affect corruption. The results of this study should increase our understanding of the relation between government spending and corruption. Read the paper: Do State Campaign Finance Reports Reduce Public Corruption?


• Ingrid Eagly (Professor, School of Law, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA))
  Videoconferencing Immigration Proceedings
  In 2006, Congress allowed videoconferencing for conducting immigration removal hearings. As a result of this legislative change, immigration judges around the country now conduct immigration hearings in which the respondent appears in the courtroom via video screen. This practice is particularly prevalent in cases in which the respondent is detained. In fact, in many immigration courtrooms around the country, hearings of detained respondents are now held exclusively by videoconference. With the corresponding increase in the use of detention to house individuals petitioning for immigration relief, the practice of videoconferenced immigration hearings has expanded greatly over the past few years. The benefits of videoconferencing are often claimed to be improved safety, judicial efficiency, and reduced transportation costs. However, the effects of this shift in the judicial process on outcomes of immigration removal hearings have not been systematically analyzed. This project will draw on TRAC's extensive databases of immigration proceedings to explore the effects of videoconferencing technology. In particular, this research seeks to understand how videoconferencing is used across multiple jurisdictions and what, if any, effects videoconferenced (as opposed to in-person) participation has on substantive outcomes. See journal article for findings from this research.


• Lee Epstein (Provost Professor, School of Law, University of Southern California)
  William Landes (Professor, Law School, University of Chicago)
  Richard Posner (Judge and Senior Lecturer, School of Law, Univesrity of Chicago; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit)
  The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice
  Judges play a central role in the American legal system-more so than in any other legal system. But the behavior of judges, and in particular the determinants of their decisions, are not well understood by lawyers, including law professors; in part this is because judges in our system are permitted to be (and are) quite secretive. Beginning more than half a century ago but accelerating in recent decades, social scientists-political scientists in particular, but also economists and psychologists, and some academic lawyers trained or interested in social science-have used increasingly sophisticated theoretical concepts and quantitative tools to place the study of judicial behavior on a genuinely scientific basis. Yet no single book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of the new learning about judicial behavior, and it is that gap that we hope to fill with a combination of survey and original research. This book presents our findings with respect to judicial behavior in the three principal tiers of the federal judiciary-the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals, and the federal district courts. We propose and test a variety of hypotheses concerning influences on judicial voting and on other aspects of judicial behavior. A major focus, of course, is on the relative weight of ideology and legalistic analysis in judicial decisionmaking in the different tiers. But we also measure more mundane, though we think very important, influences on judicial behavior, such as effort aversion (which includes but is not exhausted in leisure preference), that are predicted by our labor-economics model of judicial incentives and constraints. Utilizing TRAC's dataset on sentencing behavior in federal district courts, we will determine whether federal district judges interested in promotion to a higher court alter their sentencing behavior to improve their promotion prospects. Specifically, we would benefit from access to a dataset which lists the following attributes for each case: the district, the district judge's name, the president who appointed the judge, the year the judge was appointed, the institution from which the judge received a law degree, the judge's age at the time of sentencing, the defendant's race, the defendant's gender, the program category, the lead investigate agencies, the lead charge, whether the sentence followed a bench trial or jury trial, whether the defendant entered a guilty plea, the sentencing date, and the sentence. This analysis could be paired with our findings about federal courts of appeals justices seeking promotion to the U.S. Supreme Court.


• Gregory Hooks (Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Washington State University)
  Do Immigration Detention Facilities Bring Jobs to Host Communities?
  Facilities to detain immigrants have been built across the United States. Local communities clamor for them in hopes of generating revenues for local units of government and jobs for local residents. To date, no study has examined whether or not these purported benefits materialize. It is anticipated that this study will provide no evidence that ICE facilities promote local employment growth. Digging deeper, analyses will be undertaken to determine if ICE facilities are doing more harm than good (i.e., impeding job creation.


• Jeffrey Milyo (Professor, Department of Economics, University of Missouri)
  A Taxonomy of Public Corruption
  Opinion polls confirm that public mistrust of government and concern about political corruption are on the increase. Nevertheless, very little is known about the frequency of different types of corrupt activities or even what types of public officials are more prone to corruption. We analyze lead charges in public corruption cases over 25 years in order to describe the types of corruption observed more or less frequently in practice. This study will better inform policy makers regarding what kinds of policy responses may be most effective in reducing political corruption.


• Samir Saadi (Assistant Professor, Department of Finance, The University of Ontario Institute of Technology)
  An Empirical Examination of the Impact of Tax Enforcement on Stock Option Backdating
  This research examines the impact of tax enforcement on the incidence of stock option backdating. Consistent with the theoretical prediction that tax authority enforcement can operate as a valuable monitoring tool by narrowing the scope for managerial entrenchment, I find robust evidence that the incidence of stock option backdating is lower when firms are more likely to be subject to IRS audits. These results reinforce calls in the public policy discourse for institutions that protect investors by curtailing companies' "degrees of freedom" to engage in corporate misbehaviour.


• Crystal Yang (Assistant Professor, Law School, Havard University)
  The Impact of Judicial Discretion on Disparities in Federal Sentencing
  Sentencing disparities by race, gender, education, and socioeconomic status are prevalent in the federal criminal justice system. Black defendants are sentenced to almost five months longer in prison than white defendants with identical demographic traits, criminal history and offense characteristics. Male defendants receive over five months longer in prison compared to similar female defendants, and defendants with lower educational attainment and income receive significantly longer sentences than otherwise similar offenders. These large disparities in federal criminal sentencing prompted calls for sentencing reform in the early 1970s. In response to concerns that judges were introducing unwarranted disparities in sentencing, Congress adopted the United States Sentencing Guidelines under the Sentencing Reform Act (SRA) of 1984. After almost two decades of mandatory Guidelines sentencing, the Guidelines were struck down in United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005). As a result, Booker greatly increased the degree of judicial discretion afforded to judges. This paper first estimates the impact of increased judicial discretion via Booker on racial disparities in federal sentencing using comprehensive data on the universe of defendants sentenced between 1994-2009. Next, I examine the sources of increasing disparities after Booker by studying how different types of judges have responded to increased judicial discretion. Matching three data sources, I construct a dataset of over 400,000 criminal defendants linked to sentencing judge from fiscal years 2000-2009. Given that cases are randomly assigned to judges within a district court, any difference in sentencing practices across judges can be attributable to the judge differences, rather than case composition. Exploiting the random assignment of cases to judges in this dataset, I specifically explore the impact of experience under a mandatory Guidelines regime on sentencing practices to test the hypothesis that judges appointed after Booker develop different sentencing practices compared to their colleagues. I conclude by considering the impact of judicial discretion on other actors in the criminal justice system. I find evidence that increased judicial discretion via Booker changes the prosecutorial treatment of statutory mandatory minimums, which Booker left intact, consistent with prosecutors attempting to rein in judicial discretion. Future work on the interactions of actors at various stages in the criminal process is critical to a thorough exploration of disparities in the federal criminal justice system. See discussion paper for initial findings from this research.



2011



• Thomas J. Miles (Dean, Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics, Law School, The University of Chicago)
  The Employment Duration of Federal Prosecutors
  Prosecutors possess wide discretion to determine which individuals receive criminal punishments and which do not. The analysis proposed here will bring more closely together the conception of prosecutors as labor market actors and the decisions prosecutors make in criminal adjudications. It will do so by providing a more thorough empirical examination of the decisions of prosecutors and the duration of their careers as prosecutors. The research will make two primary contributions. First, it will provide a statistical portrait of the typical federal prosecutor or Assistant U.S. Attorney. Surprisingly little is known about the careers of line prosecutors in U.S. Attorneys' Offices, and for that reason, basic facts about their work will be an advance. In addition, the research will pay close attention to how the professional experience of the "average prosecutor" varies across district. Second, the research will more closely examine the types of legal work that correlate with turnover in the prosecutor's office. I plan to examine these relationships with hazard models. Results from this estimation will expand our understanding of the career trajectories of federal prosecutors. Perhaps more importantly, these results may provide a first clue to whether a particular set of extra-legal factors – specifically, the prosecutor's career concerns – influence the types of charges brought and the willingness to take cases to trial.



2010



• Anya Nakhmurina (PhD Candidate, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago)
  Consequences of the US States’ Monitoring Policies on the Local Governments: Disclosure, Financial, and Political Effects
  I document that fiscal monitoring policies of the US States' exert positive real effects on the monitored local governments. State Auditors in the US States that adopted monitoring policies annually review the financial statements of their local governments for any signs of fiscal distress. I use variation in the monitoring adoption to arrive at causal effects of monitoring policies. I find that monitored local governments increase the reporting quality, and experience improvements in governance (e.g. decrease in corruption) and better fiscal health. My evidence suggests that monitoring by the state strengthen local governments' stewardship incentives.



2009



• Rebecca Ruige Xu (Assistant Professor, Art and Design Department, Missouri State University)
  Sean Hongsheng Zhai (Red Dot Blue Square LLC)
  Visualizing Federal Spending
  Information visualization is usually viewed as a neutral means to support analytic reasoning. In recent times, however, designers and artists are joining the emerging field of artistic data visualization to create purposive and original representations of information. Developed based on TRAC's data collections, this artistic data visualization project explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and information visualization. It analyzes federal enforcement, demographic and economic information of each state in the U.S. with the aid of TRAC's data tools. Instead of directly representing available information, this project interprets the statistics with an aesthetic oriented approach. It associates each data type with a graphic pattern, and uses the patterns as compositing components to construct 3D computer graphics as profiles of the individual states. The graphics are created with a generative algorithm and rendered by a photorealistic rendering engine. While offering aesthetic satisfaction, the use of patterns in the visual presentation should also help the viewer's analytical reasoning and encourage a contextualized reading of the information. Some images can be viewed at reddotbluesquare.com.



2008



• Todd Lochner (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Lewis & Clark College)
  Dorie Appollonio (Associate Professor, School of Pharmacy, University of California San Francisco)
  An Analysis of Federal Immigration Prosecutions
  Political science scholars, as well as legal scholars, are currently researching questions of prosecutorial discretion, specifically why prosecutors make the choices they do. These scholars debate whether the centralizing influence of Department of Justice officials or the decentralizing forces of local political culture play a greater role in influencing prosecutorial agenda-setting in U.S. Attorneys' Offices. Political scientists also are concerned with the causes and effects of immigration policy, investigating such questions as whether changes in macroeconomic conditions or the geographic concentration of immigrants affect public attitudes toward immigrants, as well as whether presence of nativist sentiment among voters yields changes in policy. We propose to study the prosecution of immigration offenses in the four California U.S. Attorneys' Offices from 1996 to 2007. Our dependent variable (decision by prosecutor whether to decline or prosecute an immigration offense referral) would be compared with Department of Justice prioritization (measured by frequency of mention of immigration prosecution in Attorneys' General speeches), local political culture (measured by region-specific public opinion polls concerning attitudes towards illegal immigrants), economic conditions (measured by region-specific unemployment rates) and Office resources (measured by available FTEs). We hypothesize that local political culture will have a significant influence on the decision making of federal prosecutors—prosecutors will be less likely to emphasize immigration prosecutions in a liberal environment such as San Francisco rather than a conservative environment such as San Diego. We further hypothesize that macroeconomic conditions will not appreciably affect prosecutorial agenda-setting.


• Todd Lochner (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Lewis & Clark College)
  Dorie Apollonio (Associate Professor, School of Pharmacy, University of California San Francisco)
  An Analysis of Federal Obscenity Prosecutions
  Political science scholars, as well as legal scholars, are currently researching questions of prosecutorial discretion, specifically why prosecutors make the choices they do. Currently many social scientists disagree about the extent to which variations in regional political culture shape political outcomes, including prosecutorial decisions, in the United States. We propose to study federal obscenity prosecutions over time, in order to answer the question of why some federal prosecutors prioritize these cases while others do not. We hypothesize that these prosecutions are more likely to occur in "red states" rather than "blue states", are more likely to occur under Republican rather than Democratic presidential administrations, and are likely to be of a qualitatively different character in conservative political environments. More specifically, we anticipate that prosecutors working for a Democratic administration or working in a "blue state" are more likely to bring obscenity prosecutions for charge stacking purposes whereas prosecutors working for a Republican administration or working in a red state are more likely to bring these prosecutions in order to influence the qualitative nature of sexually-explicit material within their communities. Finally, we expect that the gender of the prosecutor will have no effect on the tendency to bring obscenity prosecutions. By understanding the relationships between presidential influence, local political culture, and prosecutorial strategies, this project will lead to a deeper understanding not only of prosecutorial behavior, but also of the extent to which differing regions of the United States truly are involved in a "culture war."



2002



• Eric P. Baumer (Professor, Sociology and Criminology, Penn State)
  Bianca P Wirth (Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology and Criminology, Penn State)
  Jenny Van Hook (Professor, Sociology and Criminology, Penn State)
  Immigration Enforcement Actions and Crime Exposure among US-born Citizens
  Theoretical and policy discussions about immigration and crime have increasingly emphasized undocumented immigration, but most empirical studies have focused on overall immigration levels. A few studies have subsequently examined the relationship between undocumented immigration and crime across American states, but the large and heterogeneous nature of these units may mask important local variation. Additionally, this prior work did not simultaneously consider local differences in immigration enforcement efforts, which may be important for developing a more complete understanding. The present study extends prior research through an exploratory county-level analysis of variation in undocumented immigration, immigration enforcement, and crimes.