Sociology PhD finds that immigration court system needs structural reform

Christopher Levesque is a graduate student working on the Immigration Court Observation Project, led by Linus Chan (Law) and Dr. Jack DeWaard (Sociology), which received a Human Rights Initiative grant. He is completing his PhD in Sociology with a focus on immigrant and refugee health. We sat down with him to discuss his research and work on the Immigration Court Observation Project.

HRP: What are you currently studying and how long have you been studying that? What type of projects/tasks do you work on?

Chris: I’m interested in how demographic, social, and legal processes combine to influence the detention and deportation of non-citizens in the United States. A big question I’m trying to answer is: How do immigration judges, in certain cases, make the decision to deport one person and allow another to stay? Also, what organizational and legally relevant factors—such as the growing immigration court backlog, a detainee’s criminal history, or the detainee’s family in the U.S.—matter sociologically speaking, and how?

My current projects cover a number of topics, including the U.S. immigration court system, migration within the U.S. (especially in the American Rust Belt), and health care access barriers for immigrants and refugees in the U.S. and Europe. In addition to studying sociology here at the University of Minnesota for the past three years, I have a traineeship at the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), an innovative research center that supports my studies in migration as a force for population change. There I have worked with faculty in Pediatrics, Sociology, Public Health, and the Carlson School of Management.

Currently, I’m working with Dr. DeWaard and Professor Linus Chan (UMN Law) on a Minnesota-based immigration court observation project that has been in operation since 2017 in partnership with The Advocates for Human Rights. So far, we have looked at how immigrant detainees’ criminal records (especially DUIs and traffic violations), legal status, family relations in the U.S., and other factors are associated with bond and deportation decisions in Minnesota and surrounding states. 

HRP: How do you see this immigration court project contributing to your academics? What were some motivations for pursuing this field of study and this project?

Chris: I came into the Sociology PhD program as a former immigration paralegal in New York City, and I was interested in studying migration and the sociology of law when I started here at the U. As a paralegal, my work was mostly “behind the scenes” paperwork and rarely did I set foot into immigration court. Studying the U.S. immigration court system in person has greatly enriched my understanding of the legal and social world, complementing my own work experience and personal background as a child of an immigrant myself.

This project opened up pathways for me to quantify and better understand immigration court outcomes. For instance, there are publicly-available data resources on immigration from the folks at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) based out of Syracuse University. We’ve been comparing our Bloomington, MN data with what they have at TRAC, which is nationally-representative, and we find that our numbers tend to match up with theirs. Consistently, we see long wait times, sometimes taking years for a respondent to see a judge, and their bond and relief outcomes also are very similar to what we found.

My graduate program in Sociology has taught me a lot about how immigrants are received, integrated, and excluded. With the immigration court project, I’ve been building on this training by studying “crimmigration,” a somewhat new concept that considers the intersection of immigration and criminal law. In many cases, non-citizens may have committed these crimes years ago, served their sentences, and then proceeded to lead productive, law-abiding lives. For people who have spent years, decades, and potentially generations in the United States, who have developed strong community and family ties in their neighborhood, deportation is one of the most terrible punishments one could imagine. And yet, immigrants and non-citizens are increasingly criminalized in today’s society. The HRI project has given me the resources to study this further, potentially for the remainder of my graduate school career.

HRP: What have been some of the biggest learning moments for you in immigration court?

Chris: An important learning moment for me came when I conducted interviews with over 60 of the project’s volunteers. They all had different, yet similar motivations for wanting to get involved with the court observation project, and they all really wanted to see our analysis come into fruition in an impactful and meaningful way. At the same time, we wanted to first get a better understanding of what their impressions were of the U.S. immigration court system. In those conversations, it became clear that our volunteers have different interpretations about whether or not judges and attorneys in immigration court are “fair” and “just.” But most doubted that the institution of immigration court itself promotes unbiased outcomes, and that those outcomes refute any sense of justice. 

That propelled us into thinking that third-party, public observations can help promote legitimacy and holding courts accountable to maintain compliance with law enforcement norms. It also, however, highlighted to me that immigration law is a broken system to begin with, and that larger structural reforms are needed to transform immigration court.

HRP: What’s surprised you the most about this project? What are you most excited for?

Chris: One of the most surprising things was when I went to immigration court for the very first time. Located in Bloomington, MN, it is a common sight to see a defendant sitting by themselves, wearing an orange jumpsuit, ankles shackled underneath the table. Oftentimes they, usually a male, sit alone without an attorney by their side. Just as in criminal proceedings, the judge considers not only whether the defendant poses a “danger to society,” but also whether they are a “flight risk.” However, unlike in criminal court, immigration proceedings do not guarantee the right to a public defender at the court’s expense, because the burden of proof falls on the detainee, not the state. Deportation hearings are strange in this way, because despite the hearing falling outside of the criminal realm of the law, detainees are often tried for their past criminal convictions and charges in such a way that denies them of their life, liberty, and/or property.

More can also be done to make sense of why immigration court is “on the brink of collapse,” according to a 2019 American Bar Association report. Our observers found a number of procedural due process issues that this report also confirmed regarding the entire federal immigration court system; namely, a lack of qualified interpreters, especially for cases involving detainees whose main language is a regional indigenous dialect. This is something I’m excited to study more moving forward, along with researching other forms of due process denial in the U.S. immigration court system.