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Rahima Ghafoori is a rising third-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law. As a member of IRAP’s UVA student chapter, she tracked the immigration courts’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)–the agency that oversees U.S. immigration courts–invited chaos when it decided to forgo uniform policies in favor of discrepant and varying guidance. Late-night Twitter announcements, inadequate COVID-19 precautionary measures, and widely varying rules were just a few consequences of the lack of planning and coordination by the agency. The COVID-19 pandemic put a spotlight on cracks within a system fraught with foundational defects. Recognizing a need for data collection and observation in this moment, IRAP, consulting with members of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), mobilized nearly 100 law students at fifteen of its law school chapters to track and keep record of EOIR’s actions.
The record-keeping culminated in the creation of the Court Operations Tracker—a database consisting mainly of publicly available EOIR announcements from March 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021. We hoped these records would shed light on how the immigration courts operated during this extraordinary time, and potentially help people whose immigration court cases were negatively affected or otherwise disrupted by EOIR’s COVID-19 response.
In an effort to promote transparency and accountability through observation, we tracked public official announcements of court closures, hearing postponements, and “standing orders” (i.e., court- or judge-specific policies) as well as news articles and other community reports about court operations.
From October 2020 to April 2021, each student was assigned to a particular immigration court and tasked with gathering the requisite information and uploading it for our project directors and IRAP to review.
My fellow project members and I logged over 800 events and announcements from the first year of the pandemic for over 70 immigration courts, with findings from our work revealing trends of general disorganization, dysfunction, and confusion.
In addition to these troubling trends, the project highlighted another, more positive, finding: the power of student-led work. IRAP’s mobilization of law students facilitated the collection of information on our immigration court system and helped students engage in civic activism and participation. Moving forward, it is time for agencies to forgo their opaque cloaks and embrace a system of accuracy and transparency, and I hope our Court Operations Tracker will help bring about that change.
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