James Pittman: Welcome to Immigration Uncovered, the Docketwise video podcast where we dive deep into the dynamic world of immigration law, shedding light on the latest developments, cutting edge practice management strategies, and the transformative impact of legal technology, empowering immigration practitioners with invaluable insights and exploring the intricate intersection of law and society. This is episode twelve and we have a special guest with a unique perspective. We have Dr. Austin Kocher. Dr. Kocher is a research assistant professor at Syracuse University and a faculty member at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. He is also a research fellow at the immigration lab at American University. He is an academic geographer. Austin, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background, your professional background and what led you to focus as a geographer on the political and legal geography with a specific interest in immigration enforcement?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Sure. So one origin story about how I ended up in this work comes from way before I was at a university, right out of high school. I joined the Navy and worked for four years as a law enforcement specialist, spent some time in San Diego and in Puerto Rico, and this was over 911. So I was very young. This was obviously my first job out of high school. I was basically doing it for college money. And so my very young coming of age experience was 911 and the political, not just the global political context, but also what was happening in Puerto Rico. This was in the era of the anti globalization movement. The military's presence in Puerto Rico had long been sort of controversial and divisive. And so I was kind of on the front lines of that as a young adult and having to grapple with really difficult, challenging questions about geopolitics and where I fit into all of know, I'm from a small town in Ohio and so that was my first education was not at a university but that experience on the front lines. And so when I got to university, I was really interested in unpacking that experience. And it turns out that geographers and political geographers in particular have a lot of really useful conceptual historical frameworks for asking how do we end up with geopolitical conflict in the first place? What is the role of the police and the military and so forth. So I kind of brought that background into the academy and found that the immigration actually turned out to be precisely the kind of topic that lets you ask questions that are deeply personal about personal stories and personal histories, but also allows you to ask really big picture questions about why are people moving? And why have we seen such a multiplication of borders and immigration restrictions? So for me, it was both personal, it was intellectual, and I couldn't be more thrilled that I stumbled into this fun and fascinating career.

James Pittman: That's a really interesting story.

James Pittman: And I want to get into talking about the approach that geographers take and their methodology and how that gets applied to migration and immigration enforcement. So geographers are known for a focus on space and place. Can you tell us how these concepts of space and place are central to your research on immigration enforcement and how do those concepts influence your research questions and findings?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Yeah, absolutely. This is a great question. So I think the best way to answer that is with an example. I spent a couple of months along the US. Mexico border last year looking at asylum processing. So my work and the work of Track, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to get data on immigration enforcement from the federal government and make that publicly available, a lot of that work touches on asylum and refugee processing. And it's one thing to look at data in the abstract, which we have a lot of, but for me, it's really important to go and look at what are the spaces and places where people are being processed for asylum. And right now that is often the US. Mexico border. So to make sense of that data, those large data sets we have, I wanted to go and see, what does it look like for people to go through that system? And so that means looking at ports of entry where migrants are currently being processed. Around 1000 a day, maybe 1500 a day through a smartphone app is now managing a lot of that process. So I wanted to go, I wanted to see the experiences that people were having. I wanted to see the arrangements. We think of these as just like numbers. And we see maybe on the news, we see these videos that are sort of abstracted, but ports of entry where asylum seekers are being processed, all kinds of things are happening, aren't there? It's not just asylum seekers, it's people going back and forth to work. And one of the things that you realize when you spend time in these places and really understand all of the social activity that's happening is that you realize actually asylum seekers are relatively small. Certainly it's been large this year in terms of total numbers at the border. But actually the border is not something that just divides the US. And Mexico, for instance. It's actually a point of connection. People have families on both sides. I can't tell you how many people I met in San Diego who have dentists in Tijuana in Mexico, because they're really good and they're cheaper. So people go back and forth all the time. And so that for me, is an example of know, when you really unpack these questions of space and place, particularly around borders, you see a lot that you can't see in the abstract by just looking at numbers or just by looking at the news. These are really complex, interesting, exciting places. And I think to reduce them or characterize them as just like points of crisis. Geographers are really interested in the complexity around place because so much is happening. So for me, being able to unpack that and see that firsthand and talk to people, to me, that's so much of what geography is about.

James Pittman: And geographers often employ diverse research methods to study such complex topics.

James Pittman: Could you tell us a little bit about some of the common research methods that are used in geography and how you applied them to your work in this field?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Certainly, I think the easiest division is to characterize them, some methods as qualitative and some as quantitative, with quantitative just being the use of numbers. And qualitative is using more texts and interview methods. Although, as I'll try to maybe explain a little bit, the division is not quite as neat as it, you know, at Track at Syracuse University, we get several billions of records a year. We get a lot of data. And that requires managing really large data sets, analyzing large data sets, trying to distill them down into nuggets of research findings that are legible to the public, that other researchers can use, that the media can use. So that's a quantitative work that we do using analytical methods with large data sets. I also use GIS in my work, so mapping these data as well in maps, which allows us to visualize and draw conclusions in that way and then qualitatively that work along the border involved 150 interviews. So talking to people, taking notes, taking what people say seriously, and talking to as many different people with as many different perspectives as possible to paint a full picture. But also when I described going to ports of entry and seeing what's happening, that's a kind of ethnographic method where I'm going to a place, I'm taking notes, I'm taking pictures, sometimes I'm recording soundscapes. I want to remember the sounds that are happening. Some of these places are very loud, people are waiting in cars or that kind of thing. So all of those methods are qualitative, interviews, visual methods. And what I try to do or what I hope to do with all of that is by putting that all together, it allows us to tell a richer and more multifaceted story that not necessarily gets it perfect or objective truth. That's not necessarily the goal, but to draw findings, to find research conclusions that aren't obvious to us. These aren't research findings you can read off of a New York Times article. This is really digging deep and know what are the ideas that make these places possible, what are the ideas and even the ideologies that drive the immigration system that aren't so visible, but you can sort of get at if you spend a lot of time in these places and unpack it. And I think the last thing is geographers are really interested in connection. So when I look at what's happening at the border, I don't think when you look at news reporting. Often what you see is reporting at the border, and maybe you see images of thousands of people coming across the border or razor wire or that kind of thing. And it makes it look as if everything that's happening at the border is just encapsulated at the border and starts and ends at the border. The reality is none of that would be possible without these geographic connections, both throughout Latin America where there is economic and political instability. Very interesting, actually, how little US reporting there is on places that people are know. So geographers are interested in that. You know, the US. Reporting often isn't. It's also deeply tied to Washington. And so many of those conditions that are in Latin America also didn't originate in Latin America. Many of them were influenced by US. Policy and Policymakers in Washington, DC. So understanding and unpacking those networks of connections is a fundamental part of that work.

James Pittman: Well, there's so much to unpack in what you said, and we're going to go more deeply into what track, which is the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse, what they do and what kind of data they are collecting and what they have available.

James Pittman: And we're going to go into the philosophical aspect, but I just want to highlight when I was preparing for the interview, I came across the technical term that you used, which was Geographic Information Systems. How does GIS technology serve in your research on immigration enforcement, and can you give us a specific example of where you utilize that technique?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Yeah, absolutely. So GIS is software? Basically. So if you've ever seen a map online of a map of state laws, or a map of data related to the US. Census, or a map of race and racial density in different counties or something, or political maps of political parties, all of that is driven by software under the hood that's called GIS Geographic Information Systems and allows you to map things in a really dynamic way. You can do really sophisticated statistical analysis. You can also just create really nice visualizations that I think a lot of us would agree, geographers or not, that maps really tell a story. So maps are really powerful story devices. One example of something that I've done before that was a surprise to me that I wouldn't have known if I hadn't used GIS was one of the data sources that we have from the US. Immigration courts shows the geography of people who are facing deportation right now. In the US. Court system, there's 2.5 million people right now facing deportation, and with some anonymization for personal safety and security of people involved, most of that data can be associated with zip codes and counties. So about a year ago, a year and a half ago, I mapped that data just to see where are there large concentrations of people facing deportation? Well, if you just map that in terms of the total numbers, a lot of those numbers are going to be in where? California, Texas, Florida, new York. New York City. But those numbers are driven by population because those are also large population centers. So it's not surprising that the numbers would be higher. But when you map it relative to the population of each county, that sort of helps to smooth out the variations in population that we have. And one thing that emerged was many of the counties that have the highest percentage of people facing deportation are in the Great Plains states. They're actually rural counties in the Midwest and in the Great Plains. Iowa, Oklahoma, nebraska. In some of these communities where migrant labor is so important to those economies, there may be chicken factories or other meat processing plants there. There may be farming communities that have relied on labor from Latin America, from Mexico for decades and decades. And actually those places have a higher percentage of people facing deportation. So that was kind of an interesting finding, because we don't tend to think about those more rural counties as places where a lot of people are facing deportation, but in fact they are. So that's a finding that's not just interesting, but when we publish that and put that out, one thing that that signals to, let's say, legal service providers, is it might clue some attorneys into saying, oh, maybe we should. Drive out to these rural counties and ask around because there might be people there who need legal services and aren't getting them because they're out in the country. And no one's going out there talking anymore.

James Pittman: Yeah, that's very interesting, and it's counterintuitive in some sense and really does provoke people to look more deeply and look in places that they may not have been thinking of at the outset. I want to talk about Track, because while preparing for this interview, I had a thorough look at the Track website, and it's really very impressive the amount of data that they've collected, which is accessible by the public. So we're going to get to that.

James Pittman: But first, to Segue, I want to ask you sort of a deeper question philosophically, could you share the underlying principles or philosophical beliefs that guide your research on immigration enforcement? I mean, there are a variety of values at play here. The values of humanitarian concern, the values of law and order, the values of national security, et cetera. We can go on. What values do you prioritize in your work in this area?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Sure. I think first and foremost for me is transparency and understanding. I think immigration is one of those topics that so much of the public conversation is just saturated with misinformation. So it's very difficult to have a meaningful conversation between two people where both people have a factual understanding of the system and of the policies that are in place. And so at just a foundational level, that's really hard place to get to if we're not talking about people who are specialists in this area. Added on top of that, not doing anyone any favors, is the fact that the immigration legal system is enormously complex. It's just enormously complex. So it certainly is challenging for people. And I wouldn't expect someone who is not a specialist in the field to understand all of immigration law because who has time for that? Even lawyers who specialize in immigration itself often specialize in the subdomain of immigration. Not necessarily all parts of immigration. But nonetheless, I just think that that transparency and understanding is key. So I would say my first principle in the research I do is how can I explain in a critical research based in depth way, how can I explain and articulate how the system is actually working right now? So let's say asylum is a good example. I sometimes see folks suggest that instead of coming to the United States, people should apply for asylum in their home country so they don't have to come to the United States. Well, that's not possible because the only way to apply for asylum is to be physically in the country where you apply for asylum. So it's an example of something aspirational that people would like to see so that there isn't so much immigration to the border or to the United States. But it also represents a sort of point of misinformation where that's just not possible, that's not a legal possibility. So there's a lot of little things like that that I think are important. But also, even just from a deeper perspective, many of the immigration agencies themselves don't do us a lot of favors here. They're not particularly transparent. It's very difficult to get data out of the agencies or get documents and sort of information that will allow us to understand how policy is working on the ground. So transparency in that regard, in my view, is crucial both to public understanding and to democracy. If there is wrongdoing, or if there are legal violations or concerns about the treatment of migrants in detention, for instance, those are things that the public should have a right to understand. Unfortunately, many times agencies are not just reluctant but recalcitrant when it comes to releasing information that would help us to understand. So that's a top level principle for me. And I would say that actually consumes most of my work. Most of my work is how do things actually work in reality for real people, not just immigrants, by the way, I'm talking about immigration judges. I'm talking about frontline border patrol officers. I want to know what they're going through on a day to day basis, many of them from the immigrant rights perspective. I know there's a lot of criticisms of border patrol agents, but the reality is this is a really hard job and there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing and they don't go to work intending to harm people any more. Than I did when I was in the Navy as a law enforcement specialist. I didn't go to work wanting to. I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was doing something that was purposeful and meaningful and would help improve the world in some way. But nonetheless, it's important to contextualize all of those individual perspectives and the larger questions about is this ultimately good for society? Does it have some harms that we don't necessarily recognize an individual level? So transparency and understanding, I would say the other one that's right up there with that. I do have a pretty strong commitment to social justice and humanitarian kinds of issues. I started and ran an organization that did immigrant rights advocacy when I was in Columbus, Ohio, living there for several years. So I've been on that side of things where I've sat with families. Know they have a family member facing deportation. They don't know what to do. They don't know what's going to happen if their dad gets deported. How are the kids going to get to school, how are they going to get food on the table? So I have that part of my values are there. And I think in my scholarly work, it's more clear track is really nonpartisan and non policy. We don't really take policy positions. I think in my scholarly work, it's probably more transparent that I have a real interest in immigrant rights. But even then, that principle of transparency and understanding comes first. So my scholarly work is not necessarily advocating for a particular policy position. But I think a lot of my work does ask, okay, how do these policies impact immigrants? And if we understood the experience of immigrants. For instance, I wrote an article on a woman who lived in a sanctuary church while she was during the Trump administration. She had a pending deportation order. She lived in the church, know, three and a half years. And it was a real opportunity, I thought, to say, okay, never mind what you think should be about policy. What is it like for a mother of three children to have to fight to stay with her family? And what does it look like for a faith community or religious community to come around and try to figure out how to support this woman in the face of a really large, powerful, bureaucratic immigration enforcement system? And so to me, understanding that as a human story, but also as a source of scholarly inquiry, I think reflects my values and my orientation to the work.

James Pittman: Well, before we go deeply into track, I want to talk about an important article that you wrote which is glitches in the digitization of asylum. And you hinted at this a little earlier, but in that article you delved into the role of technology in immigration processes, specifically with regard to the asylum process. Can you elaborate on what you were doing in this article and what you meant by digitization of asylum and how it affects migrants and the broader immigration system.

Dr. Austin Kocher: Yeah, absolutely. That was a really fun article to work on, just because technology, as you well know, is a very fast moving area right now, especially that intersection of law and technology. And it's not just asylum processing. I mean, it's lawyers today are working with technology in ways that they weren't ten years ago or even five years ago, from the use of AI and chat bots to process intake to the algorithms that are being used in processing people at the border, coming into borders. Canada, for instance, uses AI and algorithmic processing to screen people for risk factors as they're coming into the country. And increasingly, federal agencies are using smartphone apps because so many of us have smartphones. They're developing apps and putting apps out there for all kinds of things. If you want to reserve a space, a campsite at a federal national park, you have to download an app on your phone or go onto a website to reserve it. There's no place to file paperwork anymore. And so that digitization, as let's call it, the movement of paper kinds of forms and paper processing onto computers, onto websites, and onto smartphone apps is what I refer to as a process of digitization. It's happening everywhere, but it's definitely happening in the asylum system as well. So, for instance, starting in January of this year, nine months ago, ten months ago, migrants who came to the US Mexico border to seek asylum could no longer walk up to a port of entry. Well, technically, they couldn't walk up to a port of entry. They had been restricted from that for a while. But let's just know, hypothetically, couldn't just walk up to a port of entry. Basically, one of those buildings that is between the US Mexico border and ask for asylum, or ask to be screened for asylum, they now had to download an app onto their smartphone that's run by customs border protection and fill out digital forms to request an appointment to then get asylum. This is quite interesting and quite radical. This has never happened before. And if you think about the barriers involved what are some barriers involved? We're in northern Mexico, which is not particularly safe. These are migrants who don't necessarily have a lot of money. I don't know how many of your listeners would feel comfortable flying to northern Mexico right now and trying to get a phone plan. I mean, I wouldn't know. Getting a phone plan in a place that you're not from and then downloading the app in a place where wi fi and even cell phone data connections are not particularly strong. So there's all of these kinds of hurdles that then go into the process of even being able to submit this sort of digital paperwork to even get a chance to apply for asylum. And so I was really interested in understanding how are all of these barriers. How are these digital barriers becoming forms of informal restriction on asylum? In other words, we think about the physical border wall, but could we also think about a digital border wall that's being created on migrant smartphones? There's also all kinds of legal questions here. Is this even legal under US. Asylum law? Probably not. And there's a lawsuit right now from an organization in San Diego called ELO Trelado that's suing the federal government for violating asylum law by using this. You know, having also talked to people in the government who are close to this project, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that technology might be used to improve processing. So I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that there would be people in the agency who in good faith are trying to say, how do we better manage this process which has been done with paperwork and people just walking up the ports of entry. Is there a better way to do this? And I admire that sense of creativity and wanting to use the government, the power of the government to improve things in some way.

Dr. Austin Kocher: The question then, I suppose, that I try to address in the article with an emphasis on that word glitches, is what does it mean for migrants and refugees who are often in situations of duress, for them to be treated sort of like user beta testing at a time when they're under crisis? And is that really ethical? And are those glitches that they face in that process? Can we just say, oh, I mean, technology just always glitches, it's no one's fault. Or should we actually think about a little bit more proactively and say we should be much more careful. Technology is great, we can do so much with technology. We probably ought to be very careful, however, about rolling out experimental technology that doesn't really work that well on people who are the most marginalized people now.

James Pittman: It's such an important issue and it's a fascinating aspect of the issue. I mean, on the one hand, the law allows them to apply for asylum. On the other hand, you're putting a technological stumbling block in their way.

Dr. Austin Kocher: That's right.

James Pittman: And you can think of all the different points at which that could pose problems. I mean, they have to have access to a phone, they have to have access to a cellular network or WiFi. The program itself could glitch. You have issues of whether they are tech savvy enough to actually do that, even if the infrastructure would permit them to a lot of issues. And a very important article I would urge everybody to read it.

James Pittman: Another important article that you wrote is also on a critical topic, and that's the Double Abandonment of Immigrant Youth. That's the title that you gave it. You're discussing the Special Immigrant Juvenile status program? Could you tell us about the core issues you've identified with the Sidge SIJ program and the impact that it has on immigrant youth?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Absolutely. So we have a program in the United States, it's been around since 1990, that allows children who have been abandoned, abused or neglected, and who are immigrants, they don't have citizenship status and may not have papers, don't have legal status to go through a process to get recognized and to get documentation. The principle behind this, I think, is relatively uncontroversial. If there is a kid that's in this country and they are 8910, eleven years old, and they don't have family, they don't have parents, they may be in the foster care system, they've experienced abuse of some kind, they don't have a support network. We probably should not be prioritizing our limited government resources on deporting children back to countries where they're from. We ought to find a way for them to stay in the country and to get help they need. So that's the Sidge program. And for young people to apply for that, they first have to go to a state court and a state judge, not a federal judge, but the state judge has to make a finding that says, yes, this child is abandoned, abused or neglected. That varies state by state. But that's basically the principle. Once that's done, that young person files, obviously, typically with some help of some kind from a social service agency or an attorney, files paperwork with the federal government. They first file a form just to say, look, a judge has made this finding, I'm applying for this. After that's processed, then they apply for a form that allows them to become a legal permanent resident. So it's a two step process. We were really interested in this. This and myself and my two colleagues, layla Hass and Rachel Davidson, who work in this world. Rachel Davidson is amazing advocate for migrant youth. Leila Hass is a law professor and has been doing this work, is just an amazing Astounding scholar when it comes to migrant questions involving migrant youth. And what we wanted to do was just ask, okay, how is this program working? So they were able to get a really valuable data set from the federal government. Like I said before, they had to fight for it. Unfortunately, they had to sue the federal government to get it. The government was not forthcoming about it, but once they got it, they really wanted to understand what's there. And since a lot of the work that I do is very data related, we teamed up. And what we found was basically that this program, which should be non controversial, should be I think most people would say, yeah, kids who have been abandoned, abused and neglected, probably shouldn't be deported, has been politicized in ways that felt like it really contradicted the foundation of the program. How do we know that? Well, we know that because for a lot of these kids, the time that they spend in their childhood going through this is quite long. The. Congress requires the agency to make a decision in these cases in about six months, 180 days. We found cases where children are waiting for years and years and years to get a decision. So they might file something when they're 13 1415 and they might be moving into adulthood, still waiting for a decision and not knowing they might going to be allowed to stay in the country. They can't go to college because they or may not be able to go to college. They certainly can't get federal student loans and things like that because they don't have documentation, they don't have legal status. They're asking themselves questions about can I get married? Should I get married? Because if I don't get approved for this, I might have to leave. So there's all kinds of things that children face that makes their lives. They think they're getting into a program that's going to help them and it ends up in some ways just prolonging the uncertainty that they face. We also found that for a couple years during the Trump administration in particular, that the agency started using some bureaucratic tools that were never really used before. They can send what's called requests for evidence, they can send what's called notices of intent to deny, just very technical things. But basically they're little roadblocks that the agency was throwing out for kids and the agency so during this time period they spent all their energy just trying to create all kinds of roadblocks for these kids who are applying for Sidge while at the same time not processing any of the applications that came in. So it really looked to us. When you just look at the data, look objectively at the data, you can really see how agency resources went from trying to process these growing number of Sidge applications to trying to create as many roadblocks as possible and slow everything down and put mud in the gears of the system which impacted, in our estimation, tens of thousands of migrant youth, many of whom are still waiting today. Even once they've been through this process, even once they've been approved, because of the nature of the immigration system and its brokenness and the fact that we have all these arcane ways of allocating visas, even once these kids have been approved, they may still wait for years and years before they even get a visa. So they're just waiting around with nothing but they're just waiting for a number to come up. It's not benefiting anyone, they're not jumping the line for anyone. They've already been approved but they still have to wait for years. So really tragic. But we were really happy to sort of, I think, as a team, be able to really maximize the use of that data. And to our estimate, is sort of one of the first articles that really does a deep dive on both the relationship between the law and how the law works and the data behind the law that shows kind of the everyday part of it.

James Pittman: Yeah, it's one of those types of cases that I think there's a lot more under the surface, and it's also something which is not really widely understood by the public at large outside of the immigration bar. So I would also urge people to read that article. It's really a critically important issue, and I thank you for writing it.

James Pittman: Now your work is we've been talking about track. And that is Syracuse University's transactional records. Access Clearinghouse You're closely associated with it, and it's a center of research, and it's known for providing comprehensive data and analysis on immigration enforcement, including data relating to immigration arrests, detentions, and immigration court cases. Can you explain how Track collects and analyzes this data and what sets it apart from other sources of immigration information?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Certainly. So I think one of the most important parts of our work is that we don't generate the data that we release to the public in the sense that we don't go out and survey people. We're not researchers in that regard. The data that we use is data that is directly from federal agencies. So whatever the findings that we have and the research that we do, it's on data that the federal government itself has. And that does a couple of really important things. One is the data that's generated and created by agencies. It doesn't encapsulate or capture our research biases in some way. It's the agencies themselves, which is really powerful because then it also means that the stories we're telling are stories that actually the federal government agencies could tell themselves. They could actually do the work that we're doing because they have even better access than we have. They often don't have the resources or don't have the interest or not everyone has a research team that's focused like we are, even in federal agencies. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is, because we get this data through FOIA, we're really part of we always like to work with agencies whenever possible. We don't view ourselves as antagonistic to agencies, but we do ask for data that sometimes agencies are uncomfortable releasing. Because if the public could see all of the data that an agency has, the agency itself might lose control of narratives that it has around particular programs. If it wants to present a program as very successful. And we look at the data and shows, well, it's not quite as successful as they claim, then you can see that there's tension there with the agencies. So that certainly comes up. But at the end of the day, we're just really interested in providing data and research that the public can understand and that they can use to make sense of things. I'll just give you an example. A few years ago, there was a really controversial policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols. We're back to the border and back to asylum issues. So there was a policy that the agency implemented that forced migrants who were seeking asylum to wait in Mexico. So instead of coming into the country to seek asylum like migrants are generally doing now, they were forced to wait in Mexico. Okay, that's a policy know, we don't take any position on that. But then the question is, how is that policy actually working? In practice, it's very difficult to get data from the agency on how the program is working. Fortunately, because we had already been getting data from the immigration court system and because those migrants who are waiting in Mexico are in the immigration court system data, we were able to pull those migrants out who are in that particular program and say, okay, let's compare this group of migrants to migrants who are allowed into the country to seek asylum. And we can make some observations and some comparisons, some of the things that we found. Well, first of all, it's nice to just know literally how many people are in the program. Is it 500,000, is it 10,000? That's even just a baseline kind of fact based kind of question that it seems really easy and really important, but actually it's sometimes really hard to get at back to that first principle, that first value for me of the work. But then we were able to show, well, actually, not only were migrants forced to remain in Mexico, where we know it's sort of violent and people were experiencing some abuse while waiting, okay, but also people who were migrants who were forced to remain in Mexico had a much harder time getting an attorney. And attorneys are crucial to asylum cases. So normally above 80 or 90% of asylum seekers, once they finally get the decision phase, get an attorney. Most immigrants who file an asylum claim have an attorney who helps them file that. Migrants who are in the migrant protection protocols, only about 7% of them had an attorney on record, which meant that most of them didn't have any legal counsel. They didn't have anyone helping them figure out when to go to court. They didn't have anyone helping them figure out what paperwork might be necessary. And on the judges side, for judges who are working in the courts and hearing these cases, it's also really frustrating to judges, by the way, when clients don't have attorneys because then they have to take all this extra time to explain to the client what they need to do, what's available to them. Judges don't like it when clients show up without attorneys either. It creates all kinds of inefficiencies. So we were able to say, okay, well, this is one interesting thing. And then we also found that less than 2% of migrants in the migrant protection protocols program ever got asylum in the first place. And this was at a time when about 30% of asylum applicants were getting asylum. So there was a huge contrast in terms of the effects of this program. So we were able to say with regularity because we get this data on a regular basis, we were able to say and put out reports and say, look, this is what's happening. These are how many people are in the program. This is some of the key data points about how this program is working for people. And we don't necessarily say the government should stop this policy or it should do more of this policy or whatever. We just say, look, here are the facts. Here's how the program is working. If you like it, then the data supports your view that this is how it should work. And if you don't like it, then this is data that supports your position that this program is harming migrants. That's kind of an example of the work that we do. And we do a lot of work. We focus on immigration, but we also do work around IRS and criminal prosecutions. We look at civil litigation. We kind of look at a lot of areas of federal government, but immigration is certainly the biggest one, and it's the one closest to my heart since I'm an immigration researcher.

James Pittman: Yeah, I mean, in looking at the website, there's a vast amount of data collected from a number of agencies that people can plow through, and you have a lot of really useful tools on the site that we'll mention in a minute. But I wanted to just also highlight the fact that when you have such a large amount of data, you can really see sort of more the picture of the reality versus some of the public misconceptions. I mean, if you looking at it broadly, what are some common misconceptions or misunderstandings that are out there in the public sphere or in the policy making sphere that you've encountered when it comes to immigration enforcement? And how does the data that track is collecting sort of contradict these misunderstandings misconceptions? And how can that data provide accurate information to the public?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Certainly so one area is there's a lot of assumption about immigrants as being criminals or having criminal backgrounds. One area where we've done some work is unpacking that question and just saying how many immigrants who are in detention right now actually have criminal convictions? What are the kinds of criminal charges that might be included when a migrant goes to court, an immigrant goes to court to face deportation. That paperwork often does also include some allegations of criminal activity. So we can look at the data and we can say, well, how often are there criminal charges against a person? As opposed to just they came into the country unlawfully, or they came into the country on a visa and then overstayed their visa for some reason? We sort of differentiate between just a fairly routine, narrow immigration related issue, which immigration law is civil law by and large, and sort of criminal charges. So we're able to look at that. And so, for instance, a report that we put out last year showed that in fact, over the last ten years, the number of migrants in immigration court who have not just immigration charges but also criminal charges has been going down dramatically. It's much less than it was before. It was relatively high in the late 2000s, early 2010s, but since then has declined year over year. So that's kind of interesting to be able to just put some data behind that. So that's certainly one area we also looked at during the Pandemic. That was an era where understanding what was happening in immigrant detention centers was crucial because people in detention and prisons across the country were at such higher risk for COVID exposure because of just the concentration of people and the nature of living conditions. So by tracking the I wouldn't say this necessarily contradicts myths about the immigration system, but being able to track the number of people in detention centers as well as the number of people in each detention center in the country and put that data out on a regular basis. That was pretty helpful, I think, to the public, just to understand the scale of the problem and to be able to make informed opinions about what kinds of policies might be necessary for that.

James Pittman: Well, Track has a lot of sort of tools on its site, and I just want to touch on those briefly because I think that they can be extremely useful for practitioners and other researchers. So you have a Quick Facts tool to easily access key data. You have a data interpreter tool allowing people on the site to create reports from the warehouse of data. And you have what are called the Track Bulletins, which are free reports that are based on data from the Department of justice. Can you touch on these various tools and why each one is important and how they're used?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Certainly. So the Quickfax is the fun one. We created that about two years ago. The site is a little technical, I'll just put it that way, to navigate. So navigation is a little challenging first time around. But the Quick Facts is sort of our way of getting around that. Most people who are coming to the website are looking for just an objective source to know, like I said, how many people are in detention, how many people are facing deportation, what's the grant rate for asylum seekers in the country right now, things like that. So the Quick facts page has that. Each of those Quick Facts also links to various tools that we have. So we have an Immigration Tools page that has lots and lots of different tools. It looks at immigration courts, detention, border arrests along the US. Mexico border. All of them are interactive. Most of them have, if not hundreds of thousands, millions of records of data behind them. So they're pretty rich, pretty deep tools. And once people get just a little bit of familiarity with them. It's a great place to come. And if you have time, you can be curious. You can play around and see, oh, what's the asylum grant rate for people from El Salvador versus Brazil? Things like that. So that's the quick facts. Quick Facts is kind of a gateway into some of the larger bulletins. Like I said, we also do focus on federal criminal prosecutions and civil litigation. So we try to put out data on that on a regular basis. If you want to see how many criminal prosecutions in federal court were referred by the FBI, were referred to by IRS, there's criminal charges if you violate your taxes. In fact, we got a bunch of calls from reporters when Hunter Biden was in court, and people were asking, how often is it that these kinds of tax related charges are filed? So we answered a bunch of questions and said, it's pretty rare. It's really rare, actually, but we have the data on it, so we're able to add context to things like that. So that's what the bulletins are there for. And then the data interpreters are a bit more dynamic. Again, if we want to bring it back to immigration and say there are federal charges if someone comes into the country unlawfully, illegal entry or illegal reentry, you can go into the data interpreter, find that charge. It's an immigration charge. Find illegal entry, and it'll show you month by month how many prosecutions there were for illegal entry. So kind of nice. You can go and you can see exactly the number. Is it higher? Is it lower? You can see how many convictions came out of that. You can see if there was jail time. You can see what courts they're at. You can see what judge heard the case. So it's really granular data that allows reporters and researchers in the public to come in and be curious. Maybe it's not immigration. Maybe it's white collar crime. That's another big area for us. So we have categories for white collar crime that's used by the US. Attorney's Office. You can come in and is the Biden administration prosecuting more white collar criminals than the Trump administration versus the Biden administration? So you can come in and see that kind of data. It just allows you to see what are the trends, what are the volume of these cases? And again, it's data that we had to work really hard to get and we had to work really hard to make sense of. But now it's available to the public, and we hope it's a service. Journalists love it, researchers love it. And I think there's others just curious people who like this stuff and are data nerds, and they also like it.

James Pittman: No, it's fascinating, and it's a tremendous amount of data, which there's countless ways that you can think of applying that in your advocacy work.

James Pittman: Let's talk about immigration detention. Immigration detention, from what I understand, is currently at its highest point since the start of the Biden administration. And it seems we've returned now to the levels that were seen prior to the COVID Pandemic, and that seems to be driven by an increasing population detained by Customs and Border Protection. What are some of the key takeaways from this data? And let's say, how does this increase align with the administration's policies and priorities? And what do you think about how this data reflects the current state of immigration enforcement?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Yeah, that's a great question and we've been getting a lot of questions about that. As you said, as of the beginning of September, the numbers of people in detention, it's a little bit more than 35,000 people in detention, and it hasn't been that high since March of 2020, since the start, like almost to the day start of the pandemic in the United States as it was officially announced anyway. So that's pretty remarkable. It's been low for quite some time. Just to give some context, prior to the pandemic, the numbers were about twice what they are now, so they were as high as almost 60,000. So, okay, slightly less than twice what they are now. So they were much higher in the past during the Trump administration. They do seem to be on their way back up. The Biden administration has, generally speaking, not wanted to be very heavy handed with detention. So even after the end of the, let's say, the official end of the Pandemic, we noticed that detention numbers didn't just shoot back up, they actually stayed relatively low, relatively consistent. It's only been in the last couple of weeks that they've gone back up. So I would say oh. And at the same time, the administration has tried to rely much more heavily on what are called alternatives to detention, which involve GPS, ankle monitors, electronic monitoring through back to the smartphone thing. The government now has an app. That migrants put on their smartphones. And they do check Ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as a contract private company that does some of the contracting for them. They check in virtually on their phone as a form of tracking to make sure that person doesn't abscond or disappear, but also that they have information about when their court date is and what they need to take with them. It's kind of a whole program that the Biden administration has really put a lot of emphasis on. So I think that has maybe partly helped the agency to not see much higher migrants in detention. But I would also say in the context of just how many migrants are seeking asylum and are coming to the border and being paroled into the United States, numbers of detention are going back up, but I would still say it's still a pretty small fraction of the total number of people that could be detained. A lot of the people who are entering the country right now. In the past, during the Obama administration especially, but also during the Trump administration, the policy at the time was often to detain everyone, often for prolonged periods of time, which advocates really said, this is not necessary, it may not be. You know, it's sort of hard to say because seeing the detention numbers go back up, my view doesn't represent a positive thing. But I would say if we take it in the context of just the total policy position of the Biden administration and how they've tried to find lawful pathways for people to enter the country to seek asylum, my perspective on it is it's much lower than it could be, even with the recent increase.

James Pittman: Well, there were two statistics that really sort of jumped out at me. One was that August 2023 was a record number of new immigration court cases that were filed with EYR. And I wanted to ask, what do you believe is driving that increase? Is that the same, the border surge, or are there other factors at play there? And what challenges does that pose for the immigration court system and asylum seeker specifically? And then I also noticed I'll just give you both questions. I also noticed that there was a decline in the numbers of respondents who are being assigned to alternatives to detention. And that's an interesting development. Could you share some insights into the factors that are contributing to the decline in the use of alternatives to detention, particularly in Texas?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Certainly I'll start with that one, since were coming off the alternatives to detention in the last discussion. So it's sort of interesting. You're right. The total number of migrants in the alternatives to detention program has been declining. I was not expecting that. I expected that to continue to grow. It reached a height of about 375,000 people. That's huge. That's a lot of more than a quarter million people. I think partly budgetary factors may be driving that. The other challenging thing with alternatives to detention is right now a lot of people are being put on the technology and then taken off of the technology taken out of the program. So what we're looking at is the total number of people, but we don't know exactly how many people are going through the program. We actually did a report about a year ago that showed that a lot of people are being cycled through the program pretty quickly. So even if there's 200,000 people right now and 200,000 people every two weeks, in terms of total numbers, it's entirely possible that 50,000 people are cycling through the program. People are being disenrolled from the program while other people are being enrolled. So it's a little hard to say exactly how many people are coming through and how long they're staying in the program. But I think that the administration also has other ways of keeping tabs on people. It's a little bit of a mystery to me. I don't really have a clear answer that's a research question that I have is really understanding exactly why things have declined. But like I said, my sense from talking to folks is it's partly it's budgetary, partly they have more than just alternative detention that they're using to sort of keep tabs on people. And yeah, I don't really have a good answer for you on that. It remains on my research agenda. But as far as the immigration courts cases go, it's just remarkable. I mean, I can remember not that long ago when the fact that there were 200,000 cases pending in the immigration courts just felt like it was huge. And today it's over 2.5 million people who have cases pending in the immigration courts. When I talk to judges, I mean, judges are working so hard. And the data that we have show that judges are completing more cases than they ever have. They're working harder than they ever have. Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration hired lots of new immigration judges. So the agency has not been aware that they need staff, and they've been doing everything that they can, I believe, to make that happen. But there's just still a lot of new cases. And the reason primarily is because the courts are responsible for adjudicating those asylum claims. And there's a lot there's just been a large growth in the hemisphere of migrants seeking asylum for various reasons. Know, the political and economic struggles of Venezuela, issues in Colombia, issues in Central America. So there's a lot of need. I mean, I think of it like an emergency room. If you have a lot of people waiting in an emergency room, do you blame the people who need help, or do you blame the capacity of the emergency room? So in some cases, the immigration court has become the emergency room for asylum seekers, and they're trying to keep up, but the need just continues to outpace the capacity of the institution. Everyone's aware that's a problem. Everyone that I know who has invested and works in this system is trying really hard to find creative solutions to getting cases processed. But so far, we haven't seen that. And you're absolutely right. Our most recent analysis was not only are we not reducing the backlog, but we've never had more cases added to the court in a single month in August. I mean, that's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, because with all of the work that people are putting in, that we put into it too, to understand it and try to provide clarity and feedback and opportunities for solutions, it's still just growing at an enormous rate. I don't know how you solve that. I think some people would know. And we've seen this. We've seen this from the Washington Post editorial board. Fareed Zakaria even suggested a couple of weeks ago that we should just stop accepting asylum seekers altogether. And their rationale is this is there's so many people and the institutions can't keep up. So I understand the sentiment behind it and why they would suggest that. On the other hand, I wonder using the emergency room reference is, do you close the emergency room when you have more people who need help than ever before? I don't know if that's first of all, I'm not sure it's lawful because we have a legal system in place. Part of law and order is we have a commitment as a country to allow access to asylum. That's just a fundamental legal right that migrants have. So it's not something we can just turn the tap off. But I also empathize with the fact that it does feel like it's putting a lot of pressure on institutions and we do need to find some better solutions.

James Pittman: Yeah, it can't be overstated what a critical time it is for the entire immigration system these years that we're going through. And in fact, one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on today is because we need people such as yourself, researchers who are capable of collecting and analyzing the data so that we can really help policymakers to be informed, to make data driven decisions, to make decisions based on the realities, not on misperceptions or wrong assumptions. And that's so essential what Track is doing. So it can't be overstated how important it is, the work that's going on at Track.

James Pittman: But before we could talk about this all day, but I want to ask you about the National Immigration Lawyer Survey, and you are a co principal investigator on this survey. It uses a mixed methods approach to study immigration lawyering and perceptions of procedural justice. Can you tell us more about the goals and the significance of this survey and what, if anything, have you learned from it so far?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Yeah, we learned so much from that, me and my colleagues. We interviewed several hundred or sorry, we surveyed several hundred immigration attorneys and then interviewed about 100. Immigration attorneys are very busy, so the fact that they gave us their time in the first place was an incredible honor. And we learned so much about the profession because immigration attorneys make such a big difference to the outcome of cases in immigration court and in the immigration system more broadly. We just felt like they were in some ways the canaries in the coal mines, so to speak, of understanding problems within the immigration system. They see it every day, they live it every day. I can't think of anyone more than aside from maybe migrants themselves and maybe immigration judges. No one understands this system better than immigration attorneys who are working in the system every single day. Some of the takeaways for me was we learned a lot about how much volatility within the policy environment affects the attorney's ability to do their job. Just give you an example. Let's say an. Immigration attorney takes a client. Today, one of the asylum seekers who let's say was paroled into the country, allowed into the country last month. They show up at an immigration attorney's office today. The immigration attorney talks to them, screens them, and takes their case and says, okay, I'll take your case and I'll charge less than my usual rate because you don't have a lot of money. So let's say the attorney puts 40 or 50 hours of work into this case over the next six months. And so now maybe it's a year down the road or it's three years down the road, and they're getting ready to go to court, they're going to go to immigration court. The judge is going to hear the case. They're going to spend a couple of hours in the courtroom talking about this person's asylum case. Judge is going to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. You have to leave the country because you didn't get asylum or your case is granted, you can stay in the country. Well, what happens when there's an administration change or there's policy changes at the agency level that totally changes the laws surrounding that asylum case. All that work that an immigration attorney put into that case a year ago, year and a half ago, all the preparation that the immigrant applicant themselves did, all that might be out the window, and they have to redo that case again. Well, that attorney has already charged less than their usual rate for most cases. Now they've got to do it basically from scratch all over again. And it's a real challenge. Immigration attorneys are trying to do the right thing, but it's economically challenging. Immigration attorneys do not make a lot of money. This is not work that people go into to get rich. They're there for the work. They're passionate about the work, and it really just messes with the system. So I think the biggest takeaway for me anyway from this project was just how much volatility itself within the immigration system affects things. Crucial part of this is that the immigration courts are not independent. Courts and judges, like retired immigration judge Dana Ley Marks has been saying this for 25 years, we need an independent immigration court system because right now you get a new president, you get a new person in the White House, or you get a new attorney general. And those policies around how the immigration courts are operating can change. And judges can have all kinds of sort of restrictions and pressures put on them that a normal, independent federal judge does not have to deal with. Federal judges don't change everything every time a new person is in the White House. That's the whole point of having checks and balances is the courts are independent, but the immigration courts are not independent. And it means that that volatility is felt throughout, not only throughout the immigration system, but throughout the immigration courts. And attorneys told me again and again and again how hard their work is, how often they have to redo work every time policy changes. And I think, what's the takeaway there? It might be not only can we get better policies, but we need to build stability into our system as well, no?

James Pittman: So that's critically important. I mean, up until now, there's been really a dearth, from what I can tell, of systematic study of immigration lawyering. And that's why I was so interested in this survey. Really seems to be a pioneering effort. I can think of some other professions, some other industries where there's been much more systematic exploration of the economics of the practice and trends within the practice. And I think if we can get that really analytical work done and that really data intensive work done and really gain some real insights into how immigration lawyers work, how they're affected by policy decisions and how to improve raise the bar, so to speak, for the immigration bar and assist immigration lawyers in fulfilling the role that they're intended to fulfill within the system with that data that is super important. And I really commend you for working on that project because it really is very important.

James Pittman: I want to ask you a final question before we go. We're in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month here. And so with your involvement as a fellow at the Immigration Lab at American University and your involvement in the center for Latin American and Latino Studies there, what are some of the key research areas and projects that you're working on at American University or planning for the future?

Dr. Austin Kocher: Certainly. So the immigration lab is I'm thrilled about this. Is located within the center for Latin American Latino Studies. It's run by Ernesto Castaneda, who is very well known immigration scholar in the field. We're working on all kinds of work that really focuses on migrants and refugees in the DMV, the Washington, DC. Region. In fact, just before this conversation, we released a new report on the immigration lab website about recently arrived Afghan refugees and looking at their educational backgrounds and educational attainment and how that affects their coming to the United States and finding work. And would they like to pursue more education? How are they using the education that they have in the country? So the Immigration Lab and the center for Latin American Latino Studies has a real commitment to grounded work in that regard. That's been really fun to work on, especially because I don't tend to work on issues involving refugees from that part of the world. So I've learned a lot in the process. But the graduate students and the faculty there are just fantastic. And we've got more work coming out about the Afghan refugees, but we also have conversations with scholars across Latin America. We're looking and discussing issues involving climate migration. So climate change induced migration. That's a big problem in Latin America, where the rainy season is getting shorter and shorter, and people who had livelihoods and farming are moving to the city or even moving between countries because they're looking for work and they're looking for livelihoods. So the center is really diverse in that regard. One of the things I love about being there is that focus on Latin America in particular. There's a lot of just really great experts in the region. And many of the graduate students and other research fellows like myself are from the region, folks from Cuba, other parts of Latin America. And it really builds these really rich conversations into the work where I'm looking at data on migrants and asylum seekers from Latin America and might be looking at data on people from Venezuela. There might be a Venezuelan expert in the room. And so we're able to have a conversation and turn that data into a much more rich story than would happen without that kind of collaboration. So I just think it's so key. I believe this as a geographer, for sure. I just believe so strongly in trying to for us, as Americans living in the United States, to try to expand our sources of information and expand our perspectives outside of the United States, because I think it puts a lot into perspective and helps us to understand our position in the world and opportunities for collaboration and solidarity that we don't think about when we're only looking at ourselves.

James Pittman: Absolutely broadening our horizons.

James Pittman: Well, Austin, the hour has literally flown by and we're barely scratching the surface of all of the important and fascinating work on immigration that you've been up to. I do hope that you will consider coming back to join us again as key topics, as key developments hour in different issues relating to immigration, perhaps, especially as we get toward the election in 2024. But I do hope that you'll come back to us. And thanks again very much for joining us on Immigration Uncovered.

Dr. Austin Kocher: Thank you so much for having me. Bye.

‍