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Some researchers are assessing just how attorneys are going to stay in business. Kocher is a faculty fellow at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which uses public records to study the federal government. His research is part of the National Immigration Lawyer Survey, a collaboration with Maya Barak at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Katherine Abbott at the University of New Hampshire, and will be part of several forthcoming academic studies, including some about the economics of immigration lawyers.

For ethical reasons, the researchers were unable to share the survey results directly, but Kocher paraphrased some responses for the Prospect. In one example, an immigration attorney at a firm with several other lawyers handled a caseload that was 80 percent removal defense. But under Trump, removal cases were moving too fast for clients to make payments. Consequently, the firm can’t take these clients, because they’re unlikely to get paid. “The reality is that in the immigration field, you’re always on a knife’s edge in terms of breaking even and balancing your budget,” explained Kocher.

“The big story is that all of these changes that the administration is putting in are not just directly targeted at immigrants themselves,” explained Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at Syracuse University whose research focuses on immigration. “They’re quite targeted at destroying the immigration law profession.”

Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor, said the volume of Lake Charles cases has skyrocketed in recent months and shows no signs of slowing down.

“The sheer volume of civil insurance lawsuits in Southwest Louisiana is enormous and continues to grow even two years later, illustrating the fact that when inadequate support structures are in place, extreme weather events continue to wreak havoc in communities long after the winds subside,” Kocher told the Louisiana Record in an email.

TRAC, which obtained the numbers via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, found that numbers spiked from less than 1,000 incidents of no NTAs being filed in February and March 2021 to more than 5,000 a month in late 2021 and 2022. In April 2022, more than 7,000 cases were thrown out.

The research center says that the amount of cases being thrown out is not only wasteful of the court’s time, but also problematic for the immigrants involved — who may turn up for a court date only to have the case dismissed, and be left in limbo as to their status and what to do next.

Austin Kocher, research assistant professor at TRAC, said that on one hand he empathized with the agency due to the administrative burden it was facing with the increased numbers and increased processing. But he said the issue had arisen by allowing DHS officials to schedule the hearing in court when creating the NTA. That hearing could occur before the NTA has made it into the court system.

“The issue is, if you schedule a hearing three months out, and it takes longer than three months to actually file that NTA on the courts … then that immigrant is going to show up in court, and the judge isn’t going to really have any record of that case. So essentially nothing can happen,” he said.

He said it was not unusual for NTAs to take time to get placed onto court systems, but what is different now is the scale.

“It’s not as if it’s entirely unprecedented, they have had issues in the past,” he said. “It is unusual at the scale that this is happening and the regularity in which it’s happening right now.”

“Last year it was huge and this year it was several times even larger,” Austin Kocher, the author of the TRAC report, said of the volume of insurance lawsuits filed in the Lake Charles federal court. “It very much felt like ground zero of insurance litigation in the country.”

The April data, the latest available, could signify a new policy or “practice decision,” by the Biden administration regarding those who try to illegally cross into the United States, TRAC researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report.

“If someone has already been deported before or been charged with unlawful entry they can charge them with an unlawful re-entry which is a more serious criminal charge. So they can actually file fed criminal cases in the courts,” Kocher said.

Austin Kocher, a researcher at Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University, told Border Report that he expects this to be challenged in court.

“It certainly represents a really complicated and quite troubling jurisdictional question to have state law enforcement agencies essentially trying to usurp the role of the federal government. The Supreme Court has ruled many many times in the last decades that immigration enforcement is the purview of the federal government and typically courts don’t like it when states try to take on that role or politicize immigration enforcement within states itself so it will be interesting to see how this plays out,” Kocher said. “I have no doubt this will be challenged in court at some point and definitely represents a complicated picture.”

Kocher added that he is concerned about the process that state troopers and Texas National Guard troops will use to identify potential migrants and whether it could prompt racial profiling.

“If you’re not trained as an immigration officer of some kind how do you know who is undocumented and how do you know who crossed the border unlawfully into the country?” Kocher said.

At least 71,000 migrants were put in MPP, and another 5,114 were added since December after a lower court ordered the Biden administration to restart the program, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit from Syracuse University that tracks immigration cases.

“After several years now of MPP’s damaging effects on the asylum process, the Supreme Court’s ruling appears to allow the government to wind down the program,” TRAC researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report.

“TRAC finds that migrants in MPP rarely found an attorney and even more rarely were granted asylum. The Court’s decision does not, however, say what will happen to the thousands of asylum seekers currently in the program so the MPP saga is far from over,” Kocher said.

TRAC researcher Austin Kocher says the program has expanded rapidly since 2021.

“The biggest growth we’ve seen is in SmartLINK technology where someone has a smartphone and that smartphone itself is linked to ICE and that is used as a case management tool for tracking,” Kocher told Border Report last year.

When selecting migrants for entry in the ATD program, DHS considers their criminal and immigration history; supervision history; family and community ties; status as a caregiver or provider, as well as other humanitarian or medical considerations.

If an individual fails to respond to a SmartLINK app notification they could be subject to re-arrest and removal or deportation proceedings, Kocher said.

Most migrants given the SmartLINK app come through South Texas. As of June 20, there were 39,615 migrants loaned the special phones out of the ICE office in Harlingen, Texas, and 34,115 from the San Antonio office, according to TRAC.

Now the program is expanding – and fast. It’s more than doubled in size since President Biden took office, according to an analysis of government data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

“It continues to show just a massive amount of growth,” says Austin Kocher, a researcher at TRAC.

And all that growth, Kocher says, can be attributed to the increasing use of SmartLINK, an app that requires users to send photos of themselves as a form of checking in with authorities.

Currently more than 185,000 people are being monitored by SmartLINK – about three-quarters of those enrolled in the ATD program, ICE says.

That’s a steep increase from less than three years ago, according to Kocher’s analysis, when SmartLINK monitored less than 6,000 people for ICE.

In April and May, Kocher says, about 1,000 people a day were being enrolled in the program.

“Selecting only two months from only two years as Mr. Brnovich did qualifies as an extremely selective and decontextualized comparison, or more colloquially, ‘cherry-picking,’” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. “This does not mean that he is necessarily wrong in his conclusion, only that his choice of data does not necessarily add up to his policy conclusion.

Under Biden, there have been some changes in the implementation of border policies for unaccompanied children and families. But for adults traveling alone — the group that Brnovich highlighted — policies have remained the same. Kocher at Syracuse University said a shift in the tone around immigration from the Biden administration could lead to more immigrants trying to cross the border at the same time that COVID-19 restrictions have also relaxed.

Surveillance technology is inherently difficult to visualize and illustrate. “It effectively depoliticizes the technology because people can’t get it in their heads,” said Austin Kocher, an assistant professor focusing on U.S. immigration enforcement with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research center based at Syracuse University. He continued: “Whereas the Republicans want very simple ideas and very simple concrete material things that are very easy to point to and mobilize around. Democrats are much more effective at sort of depoliticizing these technologies through their diffusion in society.”

Overall federal prosecutions of all offenses were down 38% in January compared to the same month five years ago and down 9% from a year ago, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, which analyzes immigration data.

“Unlawful entry prosecutions — which make up the vast majority of federal court cases in general — those charges completely bottomed out and haven’t recovered,” said Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University.

There were 24 unlawful entry prosecutions in September 2021, compared to more than 8,000 in September 2018, according to TRAC. Unlawful re-entry prosecutions topped 1,000 in September 2021, less than a third of monthly totals before the pandemic.

“It’s 100% Title 42,” he said. “Everyone who would have been prosecuted is getting just turned away. I would fully expect those federal prosecution numbers to shoot way back up.”

As the number of immigrants monitored under ATD has ticked up, the number in ICE detention centers has declined. But it’s not a direct one-to-one correlation, says Austin Kocher, assistant professor and researcher at TRAC. The number of immigrants in ATD has expanded, while the number of people in immigrant detention facilities has fluctuated, he says. “[ATD] is more of a mechanism for [ICE] to expand their ability to monitor immigrants who are in the country,” Kocher says. “So we don’t necessarily expect the detention numbers to go down just because Alternatives To Detention is increasing.” Since the start of the Biden Administration, the number of immigrants in ICE detention centers has ranged from a high of 27,217 and a low of 13,258. It’s currently above 18,000.

That would help to alleviate certain responsibilities from U.S. immigration court judges, TRAC researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report on Thursday.

“The combination of hiring more immigration judges and moving many asylum cases out of the immigration courts could help the immigration court backlog considerably,” he said.

He added that historically, asylum applications processed by USCIS are granted at a higher rate than by immigration judges.

“So this new rule could result in much higher rates of approval than before,” Kocher said.

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DHS “controls the flow of cases, not the courts. If they keep the spigot turned on high, no amount of judges are going to be able to keep up,” Kocher said. “DHS has to stop trying to deport everyone.”

“It very well could be one of the most significant reforms to the asylum system in a long time, going beyond undoing the Trump administration’s attempts to limit access to asylum, and actually institute meaningful structural reforms,” said Austin C. Kocher, a geographer at Syracuse University who analyzes immigration enforcement data.

Austin Kocher, a researcher with the nonprofit organization Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, said the international community is watching to see how Ukrainian refugees will be treated at the Southwest border, especially since so many asylum seekers of color, from Central and South America and Haiti have been expelled and deported under Title 42.

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“It will be very interesting to see how the administration will handle this given that they have now flown many Haitian refugees back to Haiti on deportation flights over the last several months that has been so controversial for turning those refugees back,” Kocher said. “The U.S. will now have to contend with some of the refugee-receiving issues that countries in Europe have had to contend with, which is wait why are you letting these refugees come across as legitimate refugees when you are deporting others? … In Europe, it was North African and Syrian migrants, many of whom were turned back. In the United States it’s been often Black and LatinX refugees who have been turned back.”

“We saw a pretty significant drop in the latest data we got from U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement down to under 18,000,” Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher, told Border Report on Monday.

Kocher attributes the drop in detentions to these reasons:

• Fewer migrants are being put into detention at the U.S./Mexico border.

• A drop in interior enforcement arrests of migrants.

• More migrants are being paroled into the United States to await asylum proceedings under the Department of Homeland Security’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program.

“It’s enormous. All of the action on the immigrant detention side is in Alternatives to Detention. There’s been a huge investment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Kocher said.

The ATD program utilizes technology, like smartphones and telephonic reporting by migrants to check in with DHS officials under what the agency calls “case management.”

But Kocher said there is growing concern within migrant advocates that DHS officials are tapping into much more information on the migrants via these devices.

“The big change is they’re using smartphones with facial recognition technology, and while that is contributing to lower numbers of detentions, there are concerns that the use of that intensive kinds of tracking — not just using geo-locations but using facial recognition technology — having access to migrants’ smartphones may present other concerns to privacy and confidentiality that we just don’t understand yet,” Kocher said.

“Although some people with pending cases may have given up after waiting for their hearing or due to violence in northern Mexico, it remains a legal and moral imperative that the U.S. government abide by national and international refugee law and provide these individuals with an opportunity to request asylum,” Austin Kocher, TRAC faculty fellow, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, DHS’s process for hearing these remaining cases relies on a virtual registration process that may actually exclude precisely those asylum-seekers who don’t have access to technology and who are the most in need of protection.”

“Border crossings is a big part of the recent growth,” said Kocher, but he added that historically, most of the cases now in the queue accumulated under prior presidents, especially Trump, whose immigration policies exacerbated the backlog.

“It’s not as if the core backlog is growing at a steady rate, it’s actually accelerating,” said Syracuse University researcher Austin Kocher, who said the crush of cases will likely reach 2 million by the end of 2022.

“The immigration courts may actually be entering a new concerning era where it’s not like, we can just hire some more judges and try to keep up with the incoming cases, it’s almost like it’s getting to a tipping point where there may be no simple or easy kind of solution in sight,” Kocher said.

“If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the United States,” Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at TRAC, said in a statement.

“These findings suggest that the immigration courts are entering a worrying new era of even more crushing caseloads — all the more concerning since no attempt at a solution has yet been able to reverse the avalanche of cases that immigration judges now face,” Kocher said.

Because these complaints rarely generate substantial disciplinary actions and there is a fear of retaliation from the judges, immigration attorneys and their clients often hesitate to report misconducts, said Austin Kocher, a research associate professor at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research institute at Syracuse University.

“Immigration attorneys don’t file these complaints often enough because they still have to practice in front of these judges,” said Kocher, whose research focuses on immigration policies. “You can’t file a complaint one day against a judge and the next day come in with your client and expect the judge to treat them well. There’s just a real lack of systematic accountability.”

“We saw a pretty significant drop in the latest data we got from U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement down to under 18,000,” Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher, told Border Report on Monday.

Kocher attributes the drop in detentions to these reasons:

• Fewer migrants are being put into detention at the U.S./Mexico border.

• A drop in interior enforcement arrests of migrants.

• More migrants are being paroled into the United States to await asylum proceedings under the Department of Homeland Security’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program.

“It’s enormous. All of the action on the immigrant detention side is in Alternatives to Detention. There’s been a huge investment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Kocher said.

The ATD program utilizes technology, like smartphones and telephonic reporting by migrants to check in with DHS officials under what the agency calls “case management.”

But Kocher said there is growing concern within migrant advocates that DHS officials are tapping into much more information on the migrants via these devices.

“The big change is they’re using smartphones with facial recognition technology, and while that is contributing to lower numbers of detentions, there are concerns that the use of that intensive kinds of tracking — not just using geo-locations but using facial recognition technology — having access to migrants’ smartphones may present other concerns to privacy and confidentiality that we just don’t understand yet,” Kocher said.

“The latest data shows there are 150,755 migrant families and single individuals currently being monitored by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University,” the report said. TRAC researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report that it’s the highest number recorded in more than 15 years.

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“However, immigration attorneys and advocates have also described negative consequences to clients on ATD, such as leading to frequent and disruptive virtual check-ins and feeling constantly watched by the government, which can be traumatic for people fleeing government persecution,” he told Border Report.

This is the most in the history of the program since it began in 2004, Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher told Border Report on Wednesday.

“Alternatives to Detention is often considered preferable for immigrants, because being held in detention creates barriers to procedural justice, such as making it more difficult to obtain legal counsel. ATD is also cheaper for the government than detention. However, immigration attorneys and advocates have also described negative consequences to clients on ATD, such as leading to frequent and disruptive virtual check-ins and feeling constantly watched by the government, which can be traumatic for people fleeing government persecution,” Kocher said.

Despite Houston’s reputation for being a “welcoming city,” immigration judges there denied between 89 and 100 percent of cases from fiscal years 2016 to 2021, according to a Syracuse University analysis of over 223,469 asylum decisions nationwide.

“Once you’re in Houston, you’re kind of done,” said Syracuse University researcher Austin Kocher. “Basically all of the judges deny 90 percent or more of their cases.”

“What we’re seeing is just a slow down in terms of the number of cases that are transferred into the country,” Austin Kocher, a lead researcher for TRAC told Border Report on Friday.

Kocher speculates that the Biden administration is having trouble reaching folks who tried to claim asylum and were put in MPP. Since President Joe Biden took office, his administration has worked with nonprofit organizations to help identify migrants placed in MPP and to help earmark those eligible to enter the United States.

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“The big picture here is that MPP has had its effect and even with the Biden administration trying to create alternatives for people, it looks like by and large the people who were discouraged and prevented from applying for asylum have been affectively discouraged and prevented and there may not be a meaningful remedy,” Kocher said.

“The Biden administration’s new Alternatives to Detention case management approach appears to be driven by longstanding concerns that immigrants facing deportation often lack adequate legal and social support services. Not only does the lack of services undermine immigrants’ ability to present a full and accurate case, it also creates administrative challenges for the immigration courts that impacts efficiency. It remains to be seen just how this new Alternatives to Detention approach will work in practice, but it could be a step in the right direction,” Austin Kocher, a researcher with Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, a nonprofit that tracks all immigration court cases nationwide.

“Based on our research, we found that immigration judges vary widely in terms of how often they grant asylum. This certainly reflects the values and dispositions of individual judges, but it also reflects the fact that judges have very different caseloads depending on where they are in the country and the kind of docket to which they are assigned,” said Austin Kocher, a researcher with TRAC.

“Chinese nationals have had much higher rates of asylum success due to the way asylum law is written, so it makes sense that judges with large numbers of Chinese asylum cases are likely to have higher grant rates. On the other hand, detained immigrants have a much harder time applying for asylum successfully, so a judge who is assigned to a detained docket may grant asylum at a much lower rate than their peers,” Kocher said.

“It’s hard to find interpreters. It’s challenging to fill out forms or documents, either in Spanish and English. And even immigration judges themselves, who want to do a good job and get the right interpreters into court they also have a hard time finding interpreters for these rare languages and that can cause scheduling difficulties with the court,” TRAC researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report earlier this year.

According to researchers at Syracuse University, a higher percentage of asylum seekers have received asylum status since President Biden has taken office.

According to Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the asylum grant rate has increased from 29% to 37%.

Kocher says that could be because more people have access to attorneys under President Biden.

The pandemic also played a role in the number of cases that were actually heard.

“In March 2020, we were seeing roughly between 8,000 and 10,000 cases decided a month,” Kocher said. “Once the pandemic hit, that number fell very quickly to well under 2,000 cases a month.”

Valley immigration attorney Carlos Garcia says the Trump administration expelled more people under Title 42, which could be part of the reason the U.S. seeing a higher rate of successful asylum seekers under Biden.

“I do believe that people are applying for asylum now,” Garcia said. “Although I do believe that the government is continuing to implement several of those expulsion strategies, some cases are going through the system.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated more foreigners are securing asylum status. The asylum grant rate has increased, according to a report from Syracuse University.

Austin Kocher, an immigration detention scholar at Syracuse University, warns the camp phenomenon, with migrants languishing in tents on the borders of major Western nations at the mercy of both the elements and rogue actors, will become more acute in future migration crises. “As migrant flows are barricaded and borders become more militarized, we will see more camps and suffering across the West,” he said.

Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher, told Border Report on Monday that the number of migrants granted asylum began to significantly increase in May and June and that the overall increase even includes nearly four months of the fiscal year during which Donald Trump was still president.

“The big takeaway … was that the approval rate had gone up during the Biden administration,” Kocher said.

However, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and reduced number of U.S. immigration court hearings that have been held, it is hard for researchers to determine exactly how and why migrants are winning their cases.

Kocher speculated that it could be due to migrants obtaining legal counsel and lawyers petitioning the courts to hear cases that they believe have a strong chance of winning asylum.

“It is really is hard to tell because of the pandemic exactly which cases are getting through,” Kocher said via Zoom.

Kocher explained that affirmative applications often were handled by conservations between USCIS officers and the applicant, not in a court setting and were much less formal.

From Fiscal Years 2001-10, about 60% of asylum applications were for affirmative cases referred by USCIS, TRAC found. But in 2016, when Trump took office, the number of defensive asylum applications began to increase, the TRAC report found.

“Now it is the vast majority of cases are defensive cases, which is they are put right into the deportation process from the very beginning,” Kocher said. “A court hearing can be very adversarial, whereas a hearing with just an asylum officer can be more of a conversation and not so confrontational.”

However, TRAC researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report they have not come to any conclusive understanding on how those cases got classified into a program that ostensibly has not been restarted. “But 18 is not a fluke. Still, the number is small enough (and things are more confusing now policy-wise) that it’s hard to say exactly what’s up,” he said.

A total of 11,847 asylum-seekers were placed into the Dedicated Docket program last month — an 81% increase from those placed into the program through July, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a Syracuse University research institute that tracks immigration court cases reported Monday.

Data released Monday, however, shows an uptick in placements that have resulted in an estimated 6,000 families or an average of almost 400 asylum-seekers per day. The total number of individuals in the program is now almost 17,000, TRAC reports.

TRAC data also shows that six immigration judges in the country have a total of 66% — or two-thirds — of all fast-tracked cases in the country. The courts with the most cases are in New York City and Boston, TRAC data shows.

“So it does raise questions about how those immigration judges are going to be able to manage that high volume of cases and move them through in a timeframe that the administration would like,” Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher, told Border Report on Monday.

“More than one-third of cases identified as being on the Dedicated Docket don’t actually have that Dedicated Docket flag so that does raise questions as to how the courts will report on this,” Kocher said.

He noted that “it does take human time and labor to do this and the courts are backlogged as we know and have a lot on their plate.”

“It looks like the growth really started after Joe Biden took office,” Austin Kocher, a research associate professor at Syracuse University who tracks immigration figures, told The Hill. “The administration is somewhat loath to have detention numbers go too high because they were low during the pandemic, for good reason.”

Cleveland’s denial rate for asylum cases has surpassed the national average for years, according to Austin Kocher, an assistant professor and researcher at TRAC.

It was 72% in fiscal year 2015 and has increased since then, staying around 90% for the past three years, Kocher found.

As for why, Kocher said, “it’s complicated.”

“It’s really hard to say exactly why,” he said, but it likely has a lot to do with the makeup of the court’s judges and the types of cases they’re hearing.

“If (the docket) is made up of a lot of people who are from countries where it’s very difficult to get asylum or types of cases where the success rate is low, then that can drive the outcome,” Kocher said. “In the case of Cleveland, my sense is that the makeup of the court is driving a lot of this. … In the past four years, five years or so they’ve added additional judges that seem to reflect the disposition of the administration that hired them, the Trump administration, in terms of being very reluctant to grant asylum.”

In Detroit, the asylum denial rate is a much lower 60%, which Kocher attributed to a different cultural landscape in the northern city.

Ohio’s immigrants are diverse: farmworkers, African asylum-seekers, Central Americans, refugees and more. Detroit, on the other hand, has a clearer identity as a hub for Middle Eastern refugees, Kocher said.

Former President Barack Obama, for example, issued similar guidelines to limit enforcement to public safety risks and recent entrants. But not all ICE officers followed them, according to Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at TRAC.

“The research that we did showed that even though the Obama administration had the policies, ICE officers were still doing whatever they wanted,” Kocher said. “The Biden administration seems to be aware of this criticism in the past, but the jury is still out at the moment.”

“One of the things that has changed is that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has turned over some of the more important precedent-setting cases from the Trump administration, like restoring the domestic violence basis for asylum,” said Austin Kocher, an author of the TRAC report and assistant professor at Syracuse University.

“It raises questions both about how disruptive this may be for the immigration court system and for immigration judges. When you move cases around, it’s not as if you’re moving them in a vacuum. Other cases have to move. So these cases may move quicker, but other cases may move slower,” Austin Kocher, PhD, TRAC assistant research professor, said.

The goal of the “Dedicated Docket” program is to have a decision within 300 days of the family’s initial master calendar hearing. TRAC statistics show the initial hearing could still take months.

“I think there’s also legitimate questions about whether the administration will really be able to keep its commitment to due process and fairness. Sometimes when cases move quickly, if those individuals aren’t given the support and the legal counsel and don’t have access to an attorney, cases that move quickly can actually create barriers for those individuals to really have the time to put together a full case and find an attorney,” Kocher said.

“While the goal of this process is to decide cases expeditiously, fairness will not be compromised,” the press release shows.

Why it matters: New data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) gives another sign of just how many migrants — including families — have been crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to claim political asylum.

Nearly 12,000 migrants were added to the docket in August, according to TRAC.

Two-thirds of the more than 16,700 cases have been assigned to just six judges, portending new backlogs in a process designed to circumvent them.

One Boston immigration judge was assigned 129 cases in one day.

What they’re saying: Multiple advocacy groups have condemned the administration’s return to so-called “rocket dockets” for migrant families. There’s concern the cases are decided too quickly — not giving migrants a fair shot.

Such a fast-track court process is just another way the administration is scrambling to more quickly move migrants through the immigration process.

“Although the Biden administration is understandably trying to find creative ways to address asylum-seeking families, the new ‘Dedicated Docket’ may do more to simply shuffle cases around and disrupt immigration judge’s schedules rather than allowing the court to process asylum cases in a fair and efficient manner,” Austin Kocher, a TRAC assistant research professor, told Axios.

“The Biden administration has promised that the Dedicated Docket will not sacrifice due process for speedy adjudications. However, concerns remain that those enrolled … will not receive complete and just consideration of their cases, especially since legal representation is not guaranteed to those in immigration proceedings.”

Syracuse University immigration researcher Austin Kocher said time will tell if this approach will be more helpful than previous efforts.

“In the past, programs like the Dedicated Docket have done more to create confusion and shuffle cases around than to solve the underlying systemic programs faced by the court,” Kocher said in prepared remarks. “It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will stick to this program and if the Dedicated Docket will have positive or negative effects on immigration judges’ workloads.”

Around 25,000 people are currently detained at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, though Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials apprehended most of the immigrants held in the detention centers, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) Assistant Professor Austin Kocher.

“Based on ICE’s public data, the total of people in civil immigration detention centers on a single day was as low as around 12,000 during the second month of the Biden administration, then doubled between March and July to over 27,000 but hasn’t grown since,” Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

ICE officials have made the lowest number of arrests in decades and haven’t increased that number since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, according to Kocher. ICE detention numbers peaked around 27,000 in July and have since decreased to around 25,100 as of Aug. 24.

“These numbers appear to be driven entirely by arrests by Customs and Border Protection, which tend to happen near the border,” Kocher added. “Detentions resulting from arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency responsible for interior enforcement, remains remarkably low.”

Austin Kocher, a researcher with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, said the organization’s most recent analysis, from May, showed that more than 10,400 MPP cases had been transferred from the border to immigration courts in other parts of the country.

“Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, I think the most important thing to know is that MPP is not over,” he said.

Kocher added that TRAC will continue to follow the process and outcome of MPP cases, which could take years, given the massive 1.3 million case backlog in immigration courts.

“It’s not the thing that the government can terminate the program and we don’t have to think about it anymore, it’s so important for people to know that this is going to impact thousands and thousands of people for years to come,” he said.

Data from Syracuse’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac), an independent and non-partisan data research organization, shows a similar trend.

“The data we have on bond amounts from immigration courts system does not show any significant change at all since Biden took office in January,” said Dr Austin Kocher, Trac’s head researcher.

“About 30% of asylum claims that are made in that fashion and decided by an immigration judge in court are actually successful in the end,” said Austin Kocher with Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

“The Biden administration, like each presidential administration that has come before, appears to be experimenting with new approaches to managing the massive number of pending cases. The Dedicated Docket is the latest in a long line of attempts to accelerate new cases,” Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher said Tuesday.

Kocher cautioned, however, that it’s uncertain whether the dedicated docket is actually helping to expedite cases or just shuffle them around.

“In the past, programs like the Dedicated Docket have done more to create confusion and shuffle cases around than to solve the underlying systemic programs faced by the court. It remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will stick to this program and if the Dedicated Docket will have positive or negative effects on immigration judges’ workloads,” Kocher said.

“For those people who have to wait for years, and years to have their cases decided, it essentially means they’re living their lives in limbo,” Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at TRAC, told Gothamist/WNYC. “It delays really basic things like being able to buy a house, getting involved in your kids’ school, and it really forces people to make all kinds of really challenging decisions.”

This has been further exacerbated by the backlog of pending immigration cases, a longstanding issue that has also taken a backseat to the pandemic. In 2021 alone there are over 1.3 million pending cases across the country, with nearly 150 thousand in New York - making it the state with the third largest number of pending immigration cases, behind only Texas and California. While cases first started to mount in 2009, Kocher points to the Trump administration as a catalyst causing the system to become increasingly overwhelmed.

“It was really only under the Trump administration that that number has skyrocketed so much more,” Kocher said, noting the rise from 500-thousand cases to 1.3 million in the last few years. “But now it’s continued to grow and there doesn’t really seem to be a clear solution other than substantial immigration reform.”

Austin Kocher with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University tracks immigration trends and said most detainees are likely coming from one place.

“ICE arrests and detentions remain remarkably low across the board, really historic lows. And they just have really not gone back up at all, which means interior enforcement is clearly not a priority at this point for this administration. But border arrests and detentions have,” Kocher said, referring to the Biden administration.

Both Pinheiro and Austin Kocher, assistant research professor in the Newhouse School of Public Communication and a researcher at TRAC, question whether those like Fajardo who were able to attend their MPP asylum hearings, and ultimately lost, actually received a fair hearing. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down immigration courts, and made virtual MPP hearings commonplace. But many asylum seekers struggled to access the right technology, lawyers on the ground have told TIME, and in cases where the person does have access to technology, glitches and other failures have become a challenge during hearings. Prevalent violence against asylum seekers stranded in Mexican border cities also became a barrier to attendance, according to a report by Buzzfeed News.

Kocher points to data showing that nationally between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2020, nearly 30% of asylum cases were won in the U.S., and in the prior year, the grant rate was higher. But for those MPP cases that have been decided since the program began at the start of 2019, only 1.7% of the cases that have been decided were approved. “That grant rate is so low,” Kocher says. “That really suggests that the entire program itself was designed to make asylum impossible.”

“The purpose of the Migrant Protection Protocols was to undermine the asylum process along the U.S.-Mexico border,” Kocher adds. “One has to ask whether any of the proceedings that took place, any of the hearings that took place, were legitimate…I would say that both the data and also on-the-ground reporting shows that that was not the case.”

For now, Fajardo and others like her will wait. But Kocher, says, it is possible that many under MPP have given up at this point or have slipped through the cracks. According to TRAC, only about 40% of those with open MPP cases were actually able to enter the U.S. as of May 2021. There have been challenges finding those who qualify and getting them to sign up to go through the process, Kocher says, and there’s a chance a similar pattern may occur during phase two of the wind-down. “In many ways MPP has sort of already had its [intended] effect,” he says, “convincing people to leave the border and essentially give up hope that they were gonna have a fair shot.”

“Altogether, about 28,000 migrants in MPP received deportation orders without even being in the courtroom at the time,” he said.

TRAC data sh ows just over 10,000 people with active MPP cases have been allowed to enter the U.S. under Biden so far. Many with closed cases now get to make their case again, but Kocher said the first hurdle will be locating them to give them the news.

“It’s not like they left a forwarding address,” he said. “These are individuals who believe their cases are over, so I’d be surprised to see if they’re able to find 40% of the people with these closed cases to actually go through the process of registering and coming into the country.”

“A delay of that kind would have to be driven by political considerations, not legal or purely administrative ones,” said Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at Syracuse University. “It flags a larger question: Is the Biden administration serious about following its national and international obligations to asylum law?”

…

“Having Title 42 still in place at the same time that the administration is claiming to try and fix cases in Remain in Mexico presents the administration with a fundamental contradiction between what they claim to be doing and the way that border control is actually working on the ground,” said Kocher.

Under the new regulations, René will now have a shot of winning asylum based on the gang violence he suffered. “It doesn’t mean that they’ll get it, just simply that they’ll be eligible,” said Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration policy.

Still, the outcome of specific cases is likely to depend as much on the immigration judge they appear before as the new directives from the Justice Department, he cautioned.

Immigration judges have wide discretion in deciding asylum cases, leading to enormous disparities. At the New York Immigration Court, for example, denial rates “ranged from 95 percent down to 3 per­cent” depending on the judge, according to TRAC data.

More than half of the immigration judges currently on the bench were appointed by the Trump administration. “Whether or not this change of policy really results in a change of approval rates will partly be up to how these judges put this into practice,” Kocher said.

In Mexico and Central America, reports of the new policy quickly spread on Facebook groups dedicated to migrants. Some migrant rights activists in Central America said they were concerned that human smugglers, aided by careless reporting in the local news, could distort the move into a new selling point for people considering going to the U.S.

“While this move certainly clarifies and improves the law for asylum seekers and is being celebrated by people inside and outside the government, we should not lose sight of the fact that asylum seekers still face enormous barriers to receiving a fair and impartial hearing,” Austin Kocher, research associate professor who studies the immigration system at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, told El Faro English.

“All of the evidence points to the fact that these individuals never had a chance from the beginning,” Kocher said.

“The policy was explicitly designed to undermine the normal and usual asylum process in the United States,” said Austin Kocher, a research associate professor at TRAC. “It required people to wait in dangerous parts of northern Mexico and made it virtually impossible to retain an attorney or to provide evidence to support their case.”

According to Austin Kocher of Syracuse University, which collects immigration data, there is a “sceptical hopefulness” among many immigration lawyers that Mr Biden will reverse more of Mr Trump’s policies.

It is very difficult to say from the outset what the consequences of a traffic stop are going to be for an immigrant, says Austin Kocher, a researcher with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a government data analysis effort at Syracuse University. Kocher has studied racial profiling of immigrants, and says the outcomes can vary greatly depending on geography.

In cases such as Sylvain’s, local traffic penalties and sentencing practices make a huge difference. It is only once the immigrant passes through the criminal justice system and gets a conviction that the immigration penalties are triggered. The back-and-forth — first in criminal court and then in immigration court — can throw a person’s life into flux for years.

In some counties, local law enforcement officials have been deputized through special agreements to do immigration enforcement themselves. The approach and capacity of ICE’s field directors also matters. If they have the time and inclination, they can sift through old criminal records and find people with traffic convictions. These targets are low-hanging fruit for deportation “because, essentially, living in the United States for any longer than a couple of years, it is pretty likely that at some point, you may have gotten pulled over for some reason,” Kocher says. “So it’s a very easy way for them to generate deportations.”

“Now that DHS Secretary Mayorkas ended the Migrant Protection Protocols, asylum seekers who had to wait in Mexico during the Trump administration will be processed through the immigration court system inside the United States,” Syracuse University Assistant Research Professor Dr. Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Yet the move signals that the Biden administration will not be using that particular approach to managing the border going forward.” Kocher told the DCNF. “At the same time, the administration continues to turn back migrants back at the border – including many new asylum seekers – under the Title 42 policy that was implemented under the Trump administration.”

Mayorkas conducted a review of MPP and decided the program should end since enrolled migrants weren’t always able to attend their immigration hearings in the U.S. because of unsafe conditions and a lack of access to resources in Mexico. Immigration court hearings regarding MPP cases were paused in March 2020 due to COVID-19.

“In some ways, the termination of MPP is a formality,” Kocher said. “The Biden administration stopped enrolling new asylum seekers on day one of the administration.”

The program also burdened border officials, over 25% of migrants enrolled in MPP were apprehended attempting to illegally cross into the U.S, according to Mayorkas. (RELATED: Officials Say Human Smugglers Bringing Migrants Into The US Illegally By The Hundreds)

“The administration has not signaled if and when it might end the Title 42 policy,” Kocher said.

“When they paused the program and didn’t allow any new people enrolled in it but officially the program was in place until today, until a few hours ago,” Austin Kocher, a lead researcher with Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit from Syracuse University, that tracks U.S. immigration cases.

After he took office, Biden’s administration began to convert MPP cases and about 10,000 of the asylum-seekers placed in MPP have been legally allowed to enter the United States while they await their immigration hearings and proceedings, Kocher said. But 25,000 to 30,000 cases still remain, with many migrants waiting in dangerous border cities like Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, and Reynosa, Mexico, across from McAllen, Texas.

“The program essentially meant that any asylum-seekers who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border would not be processed through normal channels but would be forced to remain in Mexico where many faced conditions of violence and kidnapping,” Kocher said.

More than 42,000 asylum-seekers who were placed in MPP had their cases resolved under Donald Trump’s presidency, an overwhelming majority of whom were not allowed into the United States during the Trump administration.

“These are individuals most of whom never really got a full asylum hearing at all and may have returned to dangerous situations or conditions,” Kocher said. His organization tracks cases by Freedom of Information requests.

“The main difference in immigration cases comes down to whether or not someone has access to an attorney,” said Austin Kocher, a TRAC research assistant professor. “Migrants who have attorneys in asylum cases are five times more likely to have favorable outcome in those cases than those who don’t.

According to Kocher, he understands why opponents say the money could be better spent on services and programs for residents, but he says this actually benefits everyone considering some of the people facing deportation are already contributing members of society.

“This is a real win for not just immigrants who are facing deportation, if anything this is for the sense of fairness and rule of law, it’s important that immigrants have a right to counsel,” said Kocher. “The rule of law cuts both ways, these are people who have a right to stay in this country, but they often don’t know because they don’t have an attorney.”

According to the American Immigration Council, only 17 percent of detainees in San Diego have legal representation.

“Deportation proceedings are civil, they aren’t criminal, and they don’t fall under the rules where individuals are provided an attorney if they can’t afford one,” said Kocher.

I was incredibly fortunate to work with Fernanda Echavarri on her excellent but heartbreaking story about a family who went through the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) for Mother Jones. The story, titled “One Family’s Escape From Trump’s Border Hell: A 130-Week Diary” was published online on June 4, 2021 and in print for the September/October issue.

Researcher Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow with TRAC, says the data “show growing numbers of domestic terrorism prosecutions over the past two years, in particular cases in Washington, D.C., stemming from the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“…Federal prosecutors and judges have their hands full with an unprecedented influx of terrorism cases that may be complex and are, at the same, also highly political and controversial.”

While the number of domestic terror cases is showing a dramatic increase, the number of international terror cases in the U.S. is at “the lowest [point] since before 9/11,” according to the same TRAC report.

Kocher said the increase “challenges us all to rethink where terrorism is really coming from.”

“When it comes to terrorism, the threat is internal, not external,” he said.

If anything, keeping a historically low refugee admissions cap in place could exacerbate the situation at the border, according to Dr. Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University, who said the decision could “prompt still more refugees to attempt to come through the asylum system, placing an even heavier burden on the U.S. immigration court system.”

Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, carried out his own survey, interviewing sheriffs, police officers, and prosecutors about their opinions on U visas. He concluded that some officers are resistant to the process because of their anti-immigrant sentiments. “I would hear them say ‘I’m not racist, but I’m not going to help you stay in the country because you came illegally,’ ” Kocher said. “A lot of people who are in law enforcement just assume that immigrants are always lying and always trying to take advantage of the system.”

Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University and a senior researcher with Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks migration apprehensions and immigration court cases, did his doctoral dissertation in 2017 on NTAs and how the documents are used. He told Border Report they are necessary for asylum applications in many cases.

…

“They are not given immigration lawyers by the government and there are significant barriers to finding good, reliable immigration attorneys on their own, and that will be a significant challenge and add to the challenges they face,” Kocher said. “Let’s say an individual shows up in Boston to file an asylum claim with this new paperwork. Well, what’s their next step? That’s going to be quite interesting to see.”

Austin Kocher, a research associate professor with TRAC, said a majority of the more than 41,000 immigrants with closed cases had a determination in their case made without them being present.

He believes this has less to do with an immigrant’s desire to complete their cases and more to do with the barriers the Remain in Mexico program placed in their path. An attorney can make a world of difference in successfully arguing an asylum case, but MPP made it hard for immigrants to find legal representation, Kocher said.

Additionally, asylum-seekers were told to show up at ports of entry before dawn for their MPP hearings in border cities where gangs and cartels preyed on them.

“They were standing on the streets of Juarez and Matamoros at 4:30 a.m., places where people were being kidnapped and extorted,” Kocher told BuzzFeed News. “MPP was about weaponizing geography to make asylum impossible.”

And there’s no indication from the Biden administration that the thousands of closed MPP cases will get a do-over, Kocher said.

“Or really an actual first chance,” Kocher said. “This is 41,000 people who are facing violence and persecution of some kind and now have to figure out what to do.”

“Although some people with pending cases may have given up after waiting for their hearing or due to violence in northern Mexico, it remains a legal and moral imperative that the U.S. government abide by national and international refugee law and provide these individuals with an opportunity to request asylum,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor with Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks MPP cases.

Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at TRAC, said that “unfortunately, DHS’s process for hearing these remaining cases relies on a virtual registration process that may actually exclude precisely those asylum-seekers who don’t have access to technology and who are the most in need of protection.”

“Although some people with pending cases may have given up after waiting for their hearing or due to violence in northern Mexico,” Kocher added, “it remains a legal and moral imperative that the U.S. government abide by national and international refugee law and provide these individuals with an opportunity to request asylum.”

“The immigration courts and the backlog are not a physical border wall, but it is a paper border wall,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to track immigration court cases. “It’s one of the ways to keep people from participating in society in a full and complete way.”

Because none of Biden’s early executive orders mentions the court backlog, Kocher said he hopes Biden’s proposed immigration bill addresses it.

“Biden has been in office for less than a month, so it is too early to draw conclusions about where the court backlog fits within his priorities,” he said. “The only thing we know for certain is, these 1.3 million people must be taken into account or the integrity and legitimacy of our immigration system will continue to be undermined and mired in dysfunction.”

Austin Kocher, a geographer at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse — a research institute that analyzes federal data regarding immigration enforcement — said the program is more about politics than safety.

The new Gwinnett and Cobb sheriffs both ran on eliminating the program. Kocher said they tapped into the shifting sentiment in the metro area, as those communities became more diverse.

“There’s been a real sweep of Black sheriffs replacing the old guard white sheriffs,” Kocher said.

Kocher, who has done research on the program in metro Atlanta, said counties that participated in 287(g) had a “pattern and practice of racial profiling.” Conway, the former sheriff, denied that.

Kocher said his research has led him to the conclusion that “the 287(g) program is a failure.”

“The main bulk of inaccuracies and records going missing concerned asylum applicants who were facing deportation and have applied for asylum in the immigration court system,” Kocher told Border Report.

Data from asylum cases, in particular, often went missing and got so bad by November 2019 that TRAC officials sent McHenry a letter pointing out issues they were seeing. But he said they were ignored.

“They initially ignored us, then stonewalled us and then eventually dismissed the issues outright,” Kocher said.

At one point it got so bad that TRAC for several months had to pull its asylum-case tracking tool bar offline, which is used by thousands of immigration lawyers, advocates and journalists.

He said EOIR even supplied the U.S. Supreme Court with inaccurate immigration data, which it had to walk back.

“The real problem is the American people and policymakers and American public should know and have a sense of how many people are applying for asylum relief and the outcomes of those cases. It’s really just a fundamental transparency and accountability issue and with those records missing it was presenting a very incomplete picture and potentially undermining the agency’s ability to monitor itself,” Kocher said.

With a new leader, Kocher is hopeful that the agency will be more consistent with its data management and more receptive to outside input.

“In this case, with the EOIR it was really unfortunate just how hostile Director McHenry was and we certainly hope the incoming director will be more open to a frank conversation and to just understand we have a shared interest in fixing issues,” he said.

Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and author of the report published Wednesday, said that fraud within the $659 billion small business aid program isn’t surprising.

“We’re looking at the data and we just saw a jump in referrals from the SBA to the U.S. Attorney’s offices, and once we looked into it, it made sense because there’s been all these issues with the PPP,” Kocher told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in an interview. “The government’s own data shows that there’s just a lot more prosecutions coming out of the CARES Act and the PPP.”

“Because we’re looking at referrals, we don’t really know how many of these prosecutions are going to go forward, or how many referrals are still out there,” said Kocher. “But, I anticipate that we would see the number of criminal prosecutions remain steady or continue to climb into 2021.”

Austin Kocher, a researcher with Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, said he was concerned in particular about the quality of the data and information that the U.S. federal government keeps, which could cause asylum seekers to fall through the cracks.

He pointed to issues with the family separation policy at the border, where the lack of proper data kept hundreds of parents from being reunited with their children. Over the course of his work at TRAC, Kocher said he has found all kinds of sloppiness with data management.

“One of the just really widespread issues is the government just does not care right now about the quality of its own data, of its own record keeping,” Kocher said. adding that it was a disservice to the public’s right now what their government is doing.

“We don’t know because so many of their record-keeping practices are either secretive, or they’re sloppy. Or they’re both, they’re secretive and they’re sloppy,” he added.

Austin Kocher, a researcher who studies immigration policy and immigrant rights advocacy, says there are three prevalent frames in the discourse today: Immigrants “as a threat” to the country, which is where we are now; immigration as a mostly good “mixed bag” that calls for enforcement but also for paths to legalization and citizenship, and maybe a reduction in the numbers of people in detention and of deportations; and “an abolitionist approach” that ties in with the abolition or defunding of the police, and draws on a more radical and critical history of racial justice that views the institutions as basically irredeemable and unreformable.

“That one has taken more and more root,” Kocher says of this last strategy. “There are people in Congress that believe that ICE should be abolished and the agency’s responsibilities should be distributed elsewhere.”

As a researcher, he’s interested in identifying where the tension will be, especially in Biden’s first hundred days as president.

“I think that it’s possible,” Kocher says, “to have a healthy tension between an abolitionist perspective that sees the current system as being fundamentally racist and unjust, and the discourse most likely to be taken up and acted upon based on statements from the Biden administration, which is to make things better, or less bad.”

The worst-case scenario would be a stalemate if substantive action isn’t taken quickly, Kocher adds.

“Cancellation of removal is pretty specific and pretty restrictive, and it just doesn’t apply to a whole lot of people,” said Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at TRAC. “And many people just don’t know about it because they may not have a good immigration attorney, or they may not have an immigration attorney at all.”

Currently, only one out of four immigrants is represented in their deportation proceeding, according to data compiled by TRAC. Last year, those who were unrepresented faced a deportation rate of 82 percent, compared with 19 percent for those with attorneys.

Long wait times also deter immigrants from applying for cancellation. On one hand, Kocher said, applicants have more time to prepare their documents and raise money for their legal fees, which usually cost thousands of dollars. On the other hand, both the applicant’s personal situation and the national guidance on a specific form of relief could change over a long period of time. Besides adding to applicants’ anxiety, the delays could also impact final case decisions.

The federal government under Trump has exaggerated criminal activity among undocumented immigrants in its campaign to justify mass deportations, said Austin Kocher, a geographer at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse — a repository of federal data maintained by Syracuse University.

Using federal Freedom of Information laws, the clearinghouse analyzed records from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and found that during the first three years of the Trump administration, the growth in the number of immigrants detained is attributed entirely to immigrants with no criminal convictions.

“Even among detained immigrants with criminal convictions, ICE’s data show a decrease in serious convictions and an increase in minor convictions,” Kocher said.

He hopes the office under Biden will be more forthcoming with its data so people can analyze what’s happening for themselves.

“To this end,” Kocher said, “we hope that ICE decides to end its strategy of stonewalling public requests for data and chooses instead to adopt a spirit of greater transparency going forward.”

But Austin Kocker (sic), a researcher with Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, said that is immigration data they have compiled show that is not the case.

“Families that were released at the border, almost 85% of them attended all of their immigration hearings, all of them,” Kocher said. “The truth is, and the data is there, it’s not a political statement, it’s just fact that the vast majority of them go to all their hearings.”

“The obvious inference is, oh, well this is because of Biden,” says Austin Kocher, assistant professor and researcher at TRAC. But, he notes, the Biden Administration has made no major policy changes that would influence how immigration judges rule in asylum cases.

Instead, Kocher says, the higher rate of asylum grants may be due to a confluence of factors. For example, more asylum seekers this past year have had legal representation — and, historically, having a lawyer significantly increases the odds of winning asylum. (The reason for the uptick in legal representation is unclear. One possibility, the researchers say, is that attorneys representing clients with particularly strong cases may have simply succeeded in pushing their cases to the front of the line.)

Another factor may be the nationality of the people whose cases were heard. For example, Chinese applicants have more frequently won asylum cases in the past, while Haitian or Central American nationals have had lower success rates. “The country that people are from goes a long way in determining who gets asylum,” Kocher says. Geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy goals have historically played a big role in shaping asylum decisions.

The absolute number of people being granted asylum remains low, largely because courts have yet to resume their pre-pandemic decision rates after COVID-19 shut down some court activity. “The immigration courts have absolutely not recovered at all, not even a fraction really,” Kocher says. “We still have only had barely more than than 2,000 cases completed a month even right up until the end of September [2021].”

“The key thing here in terms of what’s driving a lot of the data is really getting past the pandemic,” Kocher says. “Until the immigration courts are fully open, and society is fully back to normal there’s just no way that the courts are ever going to be able to really get through these cases.”

“The immigration courts and the backlog are not a physical border wall, but it is a paper border wall,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to track immigration court cases. “It’s one of the ways to keep people from participating in society in a full and complete way.”

Because none of Biden’s early executive orders mentions the court backlog, Kocher said he hopes Biden’s proposed immigration bill addresses it.

“Biden has been in office for less than a month, so it is too early to draw conclusions about where the court backlog fits within his priorities,” he said. “The only thing we know for certain is, these 1.3 million people must be taken into account or the integrity and legitimacy of our immigration system will continue to be undermined and mired in dysfunction.”