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Posts tagged gender bias
With Fear, Favor, and Flawed Analysis: Decision-making in U.S. Immigration Courts

By Karen Musalo, Anna Law, Annie Daher, and Katharine Donato

Immigration judges (IJs), housed within the Executive Office for Immigration Review within the Department of Justice (DOJ), make decisions in asylum and withholding claims, which are life or death matters. And although their title is “judge,” IJs are DOJ attorneys who lack independence and are particularly susceptible to political pressures. Federal court judges and scholars alike have criticized the quality and fairness of IJ decision-making, and many studies have been carried out to better understand the factors that impact it. The prior studies have relied principally on quantitative data because IJ decisions are not publicly available or searchable in any existing database. The authors of this study had unprecedented access to more than five hundred IJ decisions, allowing for both a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our findings were consistent with other studies in noting that IJ experience and gender made a difference in case outcomes, with male IJs and IJs with enforcement backgrounds denying protection at higher rates. We were able to identify other significant trends as well, including that the most common reasons why IJs denied protection to credible asylum seekers were their findings that they failed to meet the extremely stringent requirements of two elements of the refugee definition elements which arguably are overly restrictive and inconsistent with international norms. We also observed patterns of incompetence and bias among these decisions.

This Article recommends several policy reforms to address the shortcomings we identify, among them: (1) the creation of Article I immigration courts, (2) improvement of IJ competence through more stringent hiring standards and continuing education, (3) increased diversity of IJs based on employment experience, (4) reduced deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals in reviewing cases, and (5) allocating additional resources to immigration adjudication.

Boston College Law Review [Vol. 65:2743], 2024, 58p.

Immigrants Monitored by ICE’s Alternatives to Detention Program Vary by Nationality, Gender, and State

By Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse

In this report, TRAC examines the growth of ATD during the first year of the Biden administration using detailed data obtained from ICE through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These data on ICE’s ATD program are not the most current. As TRAC recently announced, by the end of September 2022 the number of people in ATD exceeded 300,000 for the first time. Nonetheless, the data in this report provide a far more detailed picture than ICE’s regular ATD releases.

Syracuse, NY: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 2022.

Families in Fear: The Atlanta Immigration Raids

By The Southern Poverty Law Center

This report features stories from women swept up in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that began on Jan. 2, 2016. The report by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights found that the federal government has engaged in a needlessly aggressive – and potentially unconstitutional – act against immigrants with these home raids that targeted women and children from Central America.

Montgomery, AL: SPLC, 2016. 28p.