Resource: Detaining Families: A Study of Asylum Adjudication in Family Detention

This Article presents the findings of the first national study of the practice of detaining families as they pursue relief in United States immigration courts. The records the authors analyze were obtained from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the division of the Department of Justice that conducts immigration court proceedings, with public records requests pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).5 They focus on fifteen years of federal immigration court records-from 2001, when the United States opened the first detention facility to house exclusively families, to 2016, the final year of the Obama Administration. Our goal is to understand how migrant families detained at one of the United States' five family detention centers proceeded through the court process.