As the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents or guardians began to draw condemnation in the spring of 2018, a groundbreaking 15-year study of asylum adjudication and family detention by UCLA School of Law professor Ingrid Eagly and two UCLA Law alumni, Steven Shafer and Jana Whalley, gained attention in the national media and judiciary.
Based on a review of all family detention proceedings in immigration court from 2001 to 2016, the study, published in a California Law Review article, reveals the substantial barriers to justice that many asylum seekers find in the United States. The researchers found that families are detained in remote locations, face language obstacles in accessing the courts, and routinely lack legal representation. Nonetheless, once released, families who do find counsel have success in their immigration cases, and the overwhelming majority attend all of their court hearings.
Eagly is faculty director of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy at UCLA Law. Shafer graduated from UCLA Law in 2015 and is a supervising attorney for released youths at the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project in Los Angeles. Whalley, who graduated from UCLA Law in 2017, served as a University of California presidential fellow at the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles and is now a staff attorney at Public Counsel.
In June, the three authors published a synopsis of their findings in an op-ed in the Washington Post.
In July, U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee cited the study in her order denying the Trump administration’s request to indefinitely detain families stopped at the border. Gee, who sits on the federal trial court in Los Angeles, is a 1984 graduate of UCLA Law.
A month later, the American Immigration Council, which performs legal work and policy research to promote the fair treatment of immigrants in the United States, published a special report based on the study’s key findings. That report has in turn been cited in numerous media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego-Union Tribune.
