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Executive Summary: This paper examines the staffing needs of the US Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), as it seeks to eliminate an immigration court backlog, which approached 2.5 million pending cases at the end of fiscal year (FY) 2023. A previous study by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) attributed the backlog to systemic, long-neglected problems in the broader US immigration system. This paper provides updated estimates of the number of immigration judges (IJs) and "judge teams" (IJ teams) needed to eliminate the backlog over ten and five years based on different case receipt and completion scenarios. It also introduces a data tool that will permit policymakers, administrators and researchers to make their own estimates of IJ team hiring needs based on changing case receipt and completion data. Finally, the paper outlines the pressing need for reform of the US immigration system, including a well-resourced, robust, and independent court system, particularly in light of record "encounters" of migrants at US borders in FY 2022 and 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

He spoke about the causes of the growing immigration court backlog, particularly the "imbalance in resources" between the court system and the immigration enforcement agencies that feed cases into the courts. Immigration court reform through the creation of an Article 1 immigration court or, in the alternative, legislation to allow USCIS to review (first) all applications for immigration status. Keywords: rule of law; due process; asylum; access to justice; immigration courts EN rule of law due process asylum access to justice immigration courts 228 237 10 07/25/23 20230601 NES 230601 This paper introduces a special collection of papers on access to justice, the rule of law, and due process in the US immigration system. US Immigration Courts, despite their challenges, represent a locus of due process in the US immigration system and "the first exposure of many immigrants to due process and the rule of law in the United States.". [Extracted from the article]

The US immigration court system seeks to "fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly administer and interpret US immigration laws" (DOJ 2022a). It represents the first exposure of many immigrants to due process and the rule of law in the United States, and occupies an integral role in the larger US immigration system. Yet it labors under a massive backlog of pending cases that undermines its core goals and objectives. The backlog reached 1.87 million cases in the first quarter of FY 2023 (Straut-Eppsteiner 2023, 6). This paper attributes the backlog to systemic failures in the broader immigration system that negatively affect the immigration courts, such as: Visa backlogs, United States Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) application processing delays, and other bottlenecks in legal immigration processes. The immense disparity in funding between the court system and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies that feed cases into the courts. The failure of Congress to pass broad immigration reform legislation that could ease pressure on the enforcement and court systems. The lack of standard judicial authorities vested in Immigration Judges (IJs), limiting their ability to close cases; pressure parties to "settle" cases; and manage their dockets. The absence of a statute of limitations for civil immigration offenses. Past DHS failures to establish and adhere to enforcement priorities and to exercise prosecutorial discretion (PD) throughout the removal adjudication process, including in initial decisions to prosecute. The location of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees US immigration courts, within the nation's preeminent law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice (DOJ). The misconception of many policymakers that the court system should primarily serve as an adjunct to DHS. A past record of temporary judge reassignments and government shutdowns. The paper supports a well-resourced and independent immigration court system devoted to producing the right decisions under the law. Following a short introduction, a long section on "Causes and Solutions to the Backlog" examines the multi-faceted causes of the backlog, and offers an integrated, wide-ranging set of recommendations to reverse and ultimately eliminate the backlog. The "Conclusion" summarizes the paper's topline findings and policy proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which contemporary mobility dynamics in Mexico have changed over the last decade, leading to protracted displacement. It focuses on three populations: (1) the internally displaced due to violence; (2) Mexican nationals returning from the United States, both voluntarily and due to deportation; and (3) populations seeking asylum in Mexico and the United States. These three populations are not usually analyzed together and do not squarely fall under the traditional legal definitions. The paper outlines ways that situations of protracted displacement and insecurity present challenges in four interconnected arenas of life: housing, legal status, employment, and emotional well-being. For governments and local communities, protracted displacement requires immediate humanitarian responses and the development and implementation of public policies focused on integration. The paper concludes with a set of policy recommendations based on its findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses why and how public attitudes should matter in regulating asylum and refugee protection in rich democracies, with a focus on Europe. Taking a realistic approach, I argue that public views constitute a soft feasibility constraint on effective and sustainable policies towards asylum seekers and refugees, and that a failure to take seriously and understand the attitudes of the host country's population can have a very damaging effect on refugee protection and migrants' rights in practice. Bringing together insights from political philosophy, the politics of asylum, and research on public attitudes, I develop my argument by discussing why 'what the people think' should matter in asylum and refugee polices; how public views can and should matter given the well-known challenges with measuring attitudes and policy preferences; and what the prevailing public views might mean for the reform of asylum and refugee policies in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town's segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence – of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence – establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data have become a vital device of border governance and security. Recent scholarship on the datafication of borders and migration at the intersection of science and technology studies and critical security studies has privileged concepts attuned to messiness, contingency, and friction such as data assemblages and infrastructures. This paper proposes to revisit and expand the analytical vocabulary of script analysis to understand what comes to count as data, what forms of data come to matter and how "drawing data together" reconfigures power and agency at Europe's borders. Empirically, we analyze controversies about the practices of asylum decision-making and age assessment in Greece. We show that agency of "users" is unequally distributed through anticipations of subscription and dis-inscription, while asylum seekers are conscripted within security scripts that restrict their agency. Moreover, as a multiplicity of inscriptions are produced, migrants' claims can be disqualified through circumscriptions of data and ascriptions of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma-informed (T-I) approaches to working with vulnerable people have gained popularity in practice but are rarely used in academic research and little is known about the challenges of conducting a T-I approach to participatory research. This paper reflects on our experiences of a participatory peer research project involving unaccompanied young people seeking asylum (16–25 years) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst the project adhered to a robust ethical framework, it became apparent at an early stage in the empirical phase that our methods needed to acknowledge and accommodate the trauma of those involved in the project much more thoughtfully and effectively than our ethical framework suggested. With this in mind, we set about identifying the key elements of a T-I approach to research and how these might add value to research with vulnerable and marginalised populations. Our model of a T-I approach to peer research is framed around five core principles: working reflectively with those with lived experience; contextualising trauma; nurturing trust; showing care; and empowering those involved in and affected by the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does immigrant racialization look like in a context of legal inclusion? Although scholars have given notable attention to racialization in the face of illegality and exclusionary immigration regimes, less well understood are dimensions of racialization in inclusive legal contexts. Over the past decade, Brazil has experienced three major influxes of forcibly displaced people—from Haiti, Syria, and Venezuela. For each, Brazil radically expanded its asylum and immigration policies in their favor. At the same time, these groups have been disparately racialized in the public sphere. Using a content analysis of media coverage from 2010 to 2020, this paper examines the varied public racialization of Haitians, Syrians, and Venezuelans. Juxtaposing representations sheds light on the relationality of migrant racialization. It finds autonomy and capacity, belonging, and national ramification as key dimensions through which migrants are variably racialized. By interrogating these racial dimensions in the face of legal incorporation in Brazil, this study complicates the relationship between racialization, Othering, and legal status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To examine the history of Fremantle, Western Australia's first purpose-built asylum. Method: A range of primary sources were consulted. Results: Fremantle was opened in 1865 to house inmates away from the populace and for the most part under the care of Dr HC Barnett. Attendants as well as inmates were occupied with work roles that kept the asylum functioning cost effectively. Conclusion: Within 15 years, the structure was neglected and overcrowded. Changes to the Penal Servitude Act limiting convict transportation, petty crime and a need to manage its proliferation resulted in large numbers of people being incarcerated at Fremantle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how deportability structures the experiences of lesbian refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. The first part of the article considers the racial and gendered processes through which the UK asylum system transforms lesbian migrants into detainable and deportable subjects. Part two then examines lesbian migrant protests that are emerging to contest the United Kingdom's participation in the global deportation regime. The final part of the article discusses how deportation has become absorbed into the cycle of lesbian migration and asylum. The article concludes by calling for a feminist, queer, and anti-racist understanding of the processes through which lesbian migrant deportability is produced and experienced in 21st century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eligibility for asylum for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) has recently been contested. We summarize social science evidence to show how such survivors generally meet asylum criteria. Studies consistently show a relationship between patriarchal factors and IPV, thereby establishing a key asylum criterion that women are being persecuted because of their status as women. Empirical support is also provided for other asylum criteria, specifically: patriarchal norms contribute to state actors' unwillingness to protect survivors, and survivors' political opinions are linked to an escalation of perpetrators' violence. The findings have implications for policy reform and supporting individual asylum-seekers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal right to be heard by a judge is an important human right. However, what happens if a claimant does not meet the requirements of legal communication when given the opportunity to be heard in court? In this article, I address this question by exploring how temporal, spatial, and relational conditions encourage or silence vulnerable claimants' voices in asylum hearings and compulsory psychiatric care hearings in Swedish administrative courts. In addition, I analyze the multiple functions orality has when judges make decisions in these case types. The results provide nuance to claims in previous studies about the importance of enough time, spaces that signal solemnity, and flexibility in judges' approaches to vulnerable claimants' voices by demonstrating how these conditions interact with each other and generate different communicative atmospheres. Moreover, this study challenges the idea that oral hearings are necessarily beneficial for claimants as it demonstrates that under certain conditions orality can place claimants at a disadvantage and amplify their defenselessness. However, orality brings legitimacy to court proceedings even in these cases as it communicates justice to the public evaluating these procedures from a distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have sought to explain variation in protection recognition rates between EU member states with, however, limited explanatory power. Surprisingly, few have contemplated the role of the administration, despite it being at the centre of the process through which asylum claims are examined. We posit that recognition rates are significantly affected by administrative capacity, although the administration's action may be mitigated by political factors. Our findings show that administrative effectiveness and experience in asylum matters yield higher recognition rates. We show that government preferences and the overall political context affect protection recognition, too. Importantly, we also find that the mechanisms at play are different if we consider the different forms of protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I reflect on two interviews of transgender/gender nonconforming asylum claimants in the broader West. In the Trans*it documentary that my partners and I created, a non-binary person and a transgender woman, Ilios and Christina, interview each other on the difficulties of being a transgender/gender nonconforming asylum applicant in Greece. Greece is an understudied area with huge migration flows at the border of the EU and has no official data for Sexual Orientation Gender Identity asylum claims. The documentary, this article contends, provides a starting point for reflecting on the experiences of transgender/gender nonconforming applicants at the borders of Europe and their transition from their country of origin to the West/Greece, and for importing non-Western migrant subjectivities into our current thinking on sexuality/gender. In particular, I problematize the legal framework of Refugee Status Determination and explore the decolonization of gender identity/expression in refugee law. Finally, I reflect on the process of making the documentary and my attempt to centre the voices of gender nonconforming asylum claimants while minimizing the impact of my gaze as a white Greek researcher in the field. In doing so, this article shows how documentary film can be used as a means to further considerations of gendered normativities of asylum claims in a key, yet understudied, context. It concludes by arguing for a decolonializing approach that questions the normalization of Western standards of gender, and their transgression, in Refugee Status Determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporariness has become the norm in contemporary refugee protection. Many refugees face extended periods of time waiting for permanent status, either in camps or living among citizens in their state of asylum. Whilst this practice of keeping refugees waiting is of benefit to states, I argue that not only is it harmful to refugees but it also constitutes an injustice. First, I outline the prevalence of temporary assistance in the refugee protection regime. Second, I outline the orthodox view on temporary refugee protection – it is acceptable as long as it is not indefinite. I then spend the remainder of the article considering four arguments against temporary refugee protection: the plan argument, the reciprocity argument, the domination argument, and the compounding injustice argument. I contend that the first two arguments, which already feature in the literature, merely show that temporary protection is harmful to refugees. My own arguments on domination and compounding injustice show, instead, that giving refugees temporary protection constitutes an injustice. The domination argument allows us to critique the current practice of temporary refugee protection, whereas the compounding injustice argument shows that temporariness in any form constitutes an injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I suggest that virtue ethics can learn from Foucault's critical observations on biopolitics and governmentality, which identify how a good cannot be disassociated from power and freedom. I chart a way through which virtue ethics internalizes this critical point. I argue that this helps address concerns that both virtue ethics and the critical scholarship inspired by Foucault otherwise ignore. I apply virtue ethics to the contexts of refugee arrival, asylum procedure, and immigrant integration in Western Europe; I then see how Foucault's critical thought provides a counterpoint to virtue ethics; I finally analyze how incorporating that critique allows virtue ethics to make sense of both the context and the stakes involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has a long history in Europe and it took centre stage in German politics since the 1970s. European Union (EU) immigration laws advocate for effective and efficient management of immigration in the EU. In this discourse, neoclassical economic theories were engaged to explain why people migrate and what are the factors that attract them to move. This research is aimed at examining the circumstances surrounding the deportation of Gambian nationals from Germany and assess EU immigration law to establish that Common European Asylum System which is neither a failure nor success in terms of implementation. This research adopts qualitative methods to discuss EU immigration law, Common European Asylum policy and provide an explanation of the actions of German government in the deportation of Gambian nationals from Germany. In conclusion, the Government of the Gambia needs to be serious about development and creates an initiative that will bring sovereign national wealth. The Government of the Gambia depends on EU for many processes such as budgetary support, development projects, etc. As long as the Government of the Gambia continues to depend on the EU for economic and social advancement, more Gambian migrants will continue to be deported from EU member countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical studies on the institutionalization of the mentally ill have primarily relied on data for institutionalized patients rather than the population at risk. Consequently, the underlying factors of institutionalization are unclear. Using Swedish longitudinal microdata from 1900–59 reporting mental disorders, we examine whether supply factors, such as distance to institutions and number of asylum beds, influenced the risk of institutionalization, in addition to demand factors such as access to family. Institutionalization risks were associated with the supply of beds and proximity to an asylum, but also dependent on families' unmet demand for care of relatives. As the supply of mental care met this family-driven demand in the 1930s, the relative risk of institutionalization increased among those lacking family networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs the analytical perspective of logistics to explore a key, yet quite overlooked, aspect of the functioning of the EU border regime: the reception and associated territorial distribution of newly arrived asylum seekers. Drawing on qualitative data collected at the height of the 'refugee reception crisis' in multiple contexts in Italy and Sweden, the article shows how reception is undergoing a process of 'logistification'. In this process, organisational and logistical concerns prevail over the care for those who are assisted, and reception is turned into a logistical matter of moving and accommodating asylum seekers. Crucial to this process of 'logistification' is the warehousing of asylum seekers – an art of government that seeks to objectify asylum seekers through their depersonalisation, victimisation and (im)mobilisation. The article argues that the 'logistification' of reception not only has dehumanising effects on asylum seekers, but also exposes the attempt to make profit out their management and transfer. This creates the conditions for the development of a reception industry in which the very presence of asylum seekers is valorised for the profit of a whole range of actors who ensure the reproduction, transfer, knowledge and control of those hosted in reception facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal geographers have recently highlighted the importance of attending to the interaction of time and space to understand law and its enactment. We build on these efforts to examine the spatiotemporal influences over the processes by which asylum claim determination procedures in Western industrialised countries seek to reconstruct past events for the purposes of deciding refugee claims. Two 'common-sense' beliefs underpin this reconstruction: that the occurrences leading to a fear of persecution can be isolated and that the veracity of an asylum claim is objectively independent from the process of uncovering it. We critically interrogate these assumptions by conceptualising the fears of people seeking asylum as Deleuzian 'events'. Basing our argument on 41 interviews with people who have previously claimed asylum in the United Kingdom and firsthand accounts of asylum appeals, we explore the folding together of asylum 'truths' and the spatiotemporal processes by which they are arrived at, arguing that refused asylum claims are not simply detected by the process – they are produced by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What, if any, effect do physical barriers have on cross-border population movements? The foundational claim that barriers reduce migration flows remains unsupported. We conceptualize barriers as a tool of immigration enforcement, which we contend is one form of state repression. State repression could reduce mobilization (reduce immigration), have no effect on mobilization (barriers as symbolic political tools), or increase mobilization (backfire). We evaluate the relationship between barriers and cross-border population movements using a global directed dyad-year dataset for the 1990–2016 time period of all contiguous dyads and nearby non-contiguous dyads. Using instrumental variables, we find that physical barriers actually increase refugee flows, consistent with the "backfire effect" identified in research on United States immigration enforcement policies on its Mexican border. Furthermore, we find that state repression (immigration enforcement) creates this "backfire effect" via a "sunk costs" problem that reduces movements of people and increases movement of status from migrant to refugee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]