A two-part conversation on how to study U.S. immigration courts through data, ethnography, and advocacy. Bringing together academics, students, lawyers, community advocates, and data scientists, the panel explores what court records reveal, what they miss, and how collaborative research can illuminate asylum adjudication and access to justice.

1:30 PM - 4:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383

This two-part panel examines how interdisciplinary, collaborative methods, including ethnography, legal advocacy, and data science, can deepen understanding of U.S. immigration courts. At a moment of intense political pressure on asylum adjudication and immigration enforcement, it asks how researchers and practitioners can make these courts more visible, legible, and accountable. Panelists will explore both the promise and the limits of large immigration court datasets, showing how quantitative analysis can reveal patterns in adjudication, representation, and inequality. They will also consider what such records miss: the lived experience of hearings, the daily work of advocates, the role of students in courtwatching and research, and the human consequences of legal procedure. Bringing academics, lawyers, impacted community members, and data practitioners into conversation, the panel highlights how collaborative research can deepen public understanding of immigration courts and support advocacy in the current climate.

This event is organized by Lauren Heidbrink and Amelia Frank-Vitale.

Lauren Heidbrink is an anthropologist, Professor of Human Development, and Director of Research for the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), an ethnography of unaccompanied child migration and detention in the United States, and Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation (Stanford U. Press, 2020), which examines the deportation of Indigenous youth to Central America.

Amelia Frank-Vitale is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Princeton University. An anthropologist of migration and violence in Central America and Mexico, Dr. Frank-Vitale has documented the dangers facing people migrating across Mexico and the strategies they develop – including coming together in caravans – to manage those risks and defy restrictions on movement. Her book, Leave If You Can: Migration and Violence in Bordered Worlds, examines how Honduran youth navigate life after deportation, illuminating the changing nature of deportation as a consequence of the externalization of borders and connecting regimes of mobility control - and the creative ways people challenge them - across scale and space.

Justino Mora is a full-stack software engineer, immigrant rights activist, and community organizer. Over the past 15 years, he has built technology that has reached hundreds of thousands of people in service of immigrant and other vulnerable communities, through work at organizations including Emerson Collective, RAICES, UndocuMedia, Dreamer Innovation Labs, and Mobile Pathways.

Laura Giselle Romero is a Justice in View courtwatcher and immigration advocate. Her work centers on documenting immigration court proceedings and supporting the rights and dignity of immigrant communities.

Paulina Mendez is a Justice in View courtwatcher and a graduate student in International Affairs at California State University, Long Beach. Her work focuses on observing and documenting how immigration law and policy shape the experiences of people navigating the court system.

Ingrid Eagly is a professor of law at UCLA School of Law and serves as Faculty Co-Director of the Criminal Law and Policy Consortium. Her research on U.S. immigration courts has explored the expansion of videoconferencing in immigration courts, the rise of courtrooms inside prisons and detention locations, and the challenges of access to counsel for immigrants facing removal proceedings.

Catherine L. Crooke is a lawyer and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. She uses ethnography to study law, migration, work, and organizations. Her dissertation examines the experiences of social justice-oriented immigration attorneys to understand how professionals sustain moral commitments within institutional environments defined by constraint. 

Al Otro Lado is a binational legal services and social justice organization serving migrants, refugees, deportees, and their families in the United States and Mexico. Through client-centered, harm-reduction-based legal and humanitarian programs—including asylum support, removal defense, border-rights advocacy, family reunification, and impact litigation—it works to defend immigrant rights, challenge systemic injustices, and support families separated by immigration enforcement.

Download file: Studying-Immigration-Courts-in-Authoritarian-Times-2d-hha.pdf