Welcome to the new books network Hello and welcome to another episode on the new books network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Maya Barrick about her book titled The Slow Violence of Immigration Court, Procedural Justice on Trial, published by NYU Press. This book examines U.S. immigration courts from many sides, from many perspectives, to help us understand, like, what's actually happening here? What are the processes that are actually taking place in immigration court? And what do people think of them? And by people, we mean kind of a few different groups of people here to give us a much more textured, a much more nuanced perspective on what could be seen as kind of a very either dry legal process that's behind closed doors, or a key political thing that impacts not just these courts, but communities and politics rich and rich large. And of course, the answer is both and more. So, Maya, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast to help us unpack all of this. Yeah, thanks for having me, Miranda. Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and explain why you decided to write this book? Sure. So I'm an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, just outside Detroit. Why did I decide to write this book? This book was a long time coming. You know, as a criminologist, criminology being an interdisciplinary field itself, I tend to look at things that are connected to the criminal justice system, but not necessarily crime in a traditional sense. So a lot of my research looks at broad definitions of crime as harm. And oftentimes, I'm interested in how laypeople, regular folks experience the law or experience harms at the hands of the state or the government. Much of my work focuses on immigration. And so this book really grew out of my dissertation work. And even prior to that, I guess it really grew out of the work I did as a community organizer before I went into academia. So before I did my PhD, I was working at a worker rights center. And we were working with immigrant laborers, primarily household workers on immigrant rights issues, wage theft, those sorts of things. And one of the things I noticed when I would talk to folks about their legal rights when it came to issues of labor, it's not that they weren't concerned about these things, I want to say folks, I mean immigrants, primarily undocumented immigrants. It's not that they weren't concerned about exploitation in the workplace. But a lot of the time the conversation would shift to their experiences with the police, to their experiences with immigration enforcement and to their experiences with deportation and their fears of deportation. And this was actually a really big impediment to doing our organizing work around labor rights, because folks were preoccupied with these legal proceedings that them or their family members were dealing with. And they felt that that was much more pressing than being paid less than minimum wage, for example. And so that was sort of always on my mind. And at that time I was also interacting quite a bit with immigration attorneys. And so what I was hearing, what I was seeing on the ground was what I perceived to be the unfairness of the immigration system, and particularly the unfairness of immigration court in the US. And immigration attorneys would frame the system as rather unfair. But when I had conversations with immigrants who were experiencing these legal proceedings themselves, I started to pick up on some differences in the way that they would frame what they were experiencing and whether or not it was fair and what they were interested in as an outcome and the way attorneys would talk about it. So fast forward, I decided with this book, after doing more research on immigration, to me, the immigration court looked very unfair. And to the immigration attorneys that I spent a lot of time with, it looked very unfair. But I thought, well, I need to talk to the people who are actually going through this legal process themselves, and ask them questions about fairness, and what matters to them in terms of their interactions with the state and the law. So that was sort of an impetus for the book. So given this development over time through these different experiences, what questions did you end up kind of coming to ask in the book? Yeah, so as the project unfolded, and it changed a bit over time, and then it shifted when it turned into a book, it became a larger project and offered a bit more of a historical and political analysis as well as compared to the earlier work. But the primary question was, one, how did immigrants make sense of the law? And do they perceive the law as fair? And I set this in the immigration court system, which is a massive civil court system in the United States. Our immigration system is civil, it is not criminal, it is separate from our criminal justice system. However, over the last, depending on who you talk to, usually we market in the 80s, over the last 30, 35 years, the immigration system has become quite similar to our criminal justice system, just drawing on tough on crime policies, moving those into tough on immigration policies, tough on immigrant policies, adopting a lot of the same techniques of surveillance and supervision, of enforcement mechanisms, making our criminal, making our, I say criminal, it's a slip of the time, but making our immigration system look more and more like a criminal justice system. And so I specifically wanted to focus on immigration court to see how people's experiences with the law broadly in their home countries, since I'm talking about immigrants who weren't, folks who weren't born in the United States. And I'm, in my research, I spoke to people who had all different kinds of immigration statuses prior to being placed in deportation proceedings. So I was focused on Central Americans, but they could be people who were in the United States with a visa, or they could be people who were here, who lost a visa, so they would have fallen out of status, or they may have never had a status when they were placed in the court. And I wanted to see how their experiences with the law and legal actors in their home countries, specifically police and enforcement actors, as well as folks who work in courts, judges, attorneys, prosecutors, in their home countries and in the United States, influenced the way they made sense of the immigration court, and the deportation process, being that it is the civil system. But with these two systems, the criminal and civil have been merging in this context in the US. So again, I was focused on how they come to learn about the law, specifically immigration law, and how they make sense of whether or not a process is fair, and if they're satisfied with that process when it comes to a deportation proceeding, and maybe I should take a bit of a step back to just to say, why does this matter? Why did I care about fairness? I mean, there were a couple of reasons. One, because I was coming from this organizing and advocacy activist background, in terms of the people I was spending time with when I was working at that worker rights center, and specifically the immigration attorneys who were advocating on behalf of their clients, there were a lot of conversations about how to reform the immigration system, and specifically how to reform the immigration court system. So I did have a policy, sort of a policy framing in mind. What do we do? Is the system broken? And if it's broken, what's the solution? But I think it really was important to me to hear from the perspectives of people on the ground going through this system, to see if they found it, the immigrants found it really to be broken. And if so, in the same way or different ways, then attorneys and other legal actors, and what solutions immigrants themselves saw to improving this system. So that's why I was concerned with these questions of fairness, there was that policy perspective. But on the theoretical side, there's a vast body of literature on procedural justice, which is one of the key concepts I look at in the book, or process fairness, coming out of psychology, but also criminology. And really the key idea there is that if a process is perceived to be fair, whether it's actually fair or not. But if an individual perceives a process to be fair, they're more likely to be okay with the outcome of that process, even if it's not the outcome that they wanted. And so for criminologists like myself, the key factors to look at there are connected to state legitimacy and compliance. So also, if you think a process is fair, a legal process, let's say a traffic stop with a police officer or a court proceeding, if the process seems fair, if it seems unbiased, if it seems as though the legal actors give you a chance to tell your side of the story, and they actually listen to you, and then they explain what's going on, even if you don't get the outcome you want. So in that traffic stop, maybe you get a ticket, or in that court proceeding, you end up having to pay fines, or you end up spending a night in jail, whatever it may be. Although nobody wants to pay a ticket, no one wants a ticket, no one wants to buy, no one wants to spend a night in jail. If the process was fair, you're more likely to accept the outcome, to comply with the outcome and to believe in the legitimacy of the state or the legal system within which you're engaging. And so I want to see how that applied in the immigration context as well. Okay, so this is very useful because it gives us a great foundation to kind of poke into these questions and figure out what you found from investigating them in the sort of vein already of kind of the overview of what the system is, right? Because otherwise, we don't necessarily have context for what different people think is fair or not. Can you give us a brief overview of how deportation works in the US today, as well as ways that people might get relief from deportation, so we know kind of what the environments are in, where fairness is or is not happening? Yeah, certainly. And that is a big question, so I don't give a as brief of a summary as I can, and I'll preface it by saying I'm not an attorney. I spend a lot of time with immigration attorneys. I've conducted a lot of research with them exploring these processes, but I'm not an attorney. So my framing when I talk about deportation and the law is coming from a socio-legal perspective of a sociologist as opposed to a lawyer, broadly understood in the United States. If you are not born here, and you are not a citizen, you have to request permission to come here and stay for shorter or longer periods of time. There are different types of visas for which one can apply. Some of them, the short-term temporary immigration statuses, some of them permanent statuses, or with the possibility to become a citizen. Even in the United States, who is not a citizen, is potentially subject to deportation. So even if someone has been living in the United States with what we call a green card, a permanent visa that allows you residency, it allows you to live and work in the United States, perhaps for decades and decades, if you don't become a citizen, it is possible that you could be placed in deportation proceedings. Why are people placed in deportation proceedings? Well, they either don't have a status to begin with. So when we think about, especially in the United States, the conversation is about undocumented or illegal immigration. We think about people who enter the United States from a legal perspective that's called without inspection, so they come in across the border, they don't go through a customs process, they do not have a visa. For example, those folks could be subject to deportation at any time. If you're here without status, you can be deported. If you come to the United States with status, but you let that status lapse, you overstay your visa, you could be placed in deportation proceedings. Finally, if you violate the terms of your visa, and depending on the kind of visa you have, there will be different terms and restrictions about what you aren't allowed to do in the United States, you could be placed in deportation proceedings. Committing a crime is one of the ways, not the only ways that someone could violate the terms of their visa and find themselves eventually placed in deportation proceedings. But again, since we have the separate criminal and civil systems and immigration is civil, depending on the crime that is committed, one will go through a criminal process first and then be transferred into immigration custody to go through deportation. Deportation is not definite, just because one is eligible to be deported doesn't mean that's what will happen. There are a handful of forms of relief from deportation, but the bar is very high. And so most people who find themselves in a deportation proceeding aren't eligible for any kind of relief from deportation. And so for those folks, it really is inevitable that eventually they will be deported. The rare exceptions would be, for example, individuals who have been victims of a crime are victims of domestic abuse. There's a way for them to find relief from deportation. Similarly, individuals who are eligible for asylum may be able to seek asylum as a form of relief from deportation. The bar for asylum is very high. And the bar keeps moving higher and higher in recent years, even as very recently under the Biden administration. And so it becomes more and more difficult to meet the requirements of an asylum case, you have to demonstrate among a number of things that you would be subject to persecution because of your identity, or you to be deported to your home country, and that the government is incapable of protecting you. And that's just a very narrow legal criteria to meet. We could have a conversation and we could say, oh, it seems that this person would be subject to this kind of persecution, but they still might not meet that bar. And then another, one of the common forms of relief from deportation, and when I say common, I just mean it's one of the options, but it's still hard to meet this would be that a US citizen family member would face extreme, extreme hardship where you to be deported. So you think about cases where there's a dependent family member, US citizen family member who has very serious health needs or special needs. And the immigrant face in deportation is the primary caregiver and financial supporter for this individual. Then perhaps you could make a case for relief from deportation. Again, that's very difficult as well. So for most people, once you're placed in deportation proceedings, there's very little you can do to find a form of relief. One other form of relief, which at different points in time has been more or less commonly used, depending on the presidential administration, the president in office, since our immigration system falls under the executive in terms of how we apply policy, but Congress is the one who passes the law governing immigration itself. And the executive office interprets that would be sort of a form of prosecutorial discretion. If we think about a criminal justice system where a prosecutor can decide to dismiss a charge, when prosecutors in the criminal system have the authority to charge someone or not with a crime, and they can dismiss that charge. And so in the immigration system, there's something similar where the government attorney who is akin to a prosecuting attorney in a criminal court setting is able to essentially dismiss the deportation. It doesn't give anyone, it doesn't give the immigrant any kind of legal status in the United States, and they could be placed in deportation proceedings at any time in the future. It just means right now the government is not pursuing deportation. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Munday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow wherever you are. Tap the banner to go to Munday.com. So that's the context. So this is very helpful context, both kind of to understand generally and also to sort of set up kind of why the next question was such a key part of your research. What you've just described is not straightforward, right? And I have the benefit of being pretty good at reading and listening to an expert speaking or writing in English explaining this, right? That is not the case necessarily for some of the people in these situations. You know, I'm sat in a very nice comfy room where there's not a ton of stakes of me understanding like every single nuance in this debate. I come from quite a position of privilege on that front, in addition to the linguistic ease. How do immigrants learn about all of these different systems and the cause and effect and the this and the that and here's the exception over here and what you have to do to try and see if you might be eligible for this kind of deportation relief? I mean, how? Yeah, it's a big that was so that was one of the big questions I was interested in as well, especially when spending time with immigration attorneys, they're telling me. And again, the book I interviewed, Central Americans who were going through deportation, their family members and also immigration attorneys who represent clients and immigration court based in deportation and the immigration attorneys themselves, people who have spent years training and studying and interning and shadowing and working on this area of law, they themselves say this immigration law is so complex even for us who dedicate our lives to the study and practice of immigration law. So how is it that folks who are coming to the United States with a different sort of legal background, different socio legal cultural experiences and expectations, different language capacities and capabilities, how is it that folks are making sense of and navigating the system, which is really very difficult even for folks again, who are from the United States socialized in our legal culture who go to law school, who practice in this area of law. And so, but yet, they're doing it. And yet, immigrants are navigating the system, even if there are many of them are ending up deported. So, as I said, I interviewed Central Americans, folks from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, who were going through deportation and their family members. And I picked Central Americans specifically because they're among the, of all those folks who are placed in deportation proceedings each year in the United States, they're always in the top five. It kind of bumps up and down. Sometimes they're in the top three, sometimes they're in the top five. And so many, many Central Americans are being processed through the immigration courts. And I should also take one step back and say, you know, we have a couple hundred immigration courts in the country and currently a backlog of over three million cases in immigration court. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are deported from the United States every year. They're not all going through the immigration court. There are a few other ways this can happen sort of at the border. But many of them are. And so, not only do you have this complex legal system and not only do you have people who are going through the system, oftentimes with various language barriers, different kinds of backgrounds and levels of education, socioeconomic status, different types of experiences with the law in the United States. But everything is sort of backed up, slowed down and get moving at a fast pace. There's a lot of complex bureaucracy trying to manage these over three million backlogged cases of folks. So how do immigrants make their way through the system? How do they learn about the system? Well, for the most part, the folks that I spoke to, they learn about immigration law in the U.S. through their social networks, through their communities, their family members through gossip, through storytelling. That's one of the primary ways. Many of the immigrants who I interviewed even though for the most part, they were all folks who were low income and had difficulty hiring attorneys. These are not wealthy immigrants who I was interviewing. They would seek out, not all of them, but many of them would try to seek out attorneys who could give them advice. They would kind of attorney shock and meet with multiple attorneys and have free consultations or maybe paid consultations to get different perspectives on the factors in their individual cases and share that information among one another, often comparing the characteristics of their case or their family members' case with characteristics that they would hear about a neighbor's case or a cousin's case, and then also sort of through media, social media, and Spanish language news, right? That was a primary way. But a lot of it is storytelling and gossip. But informative, useful storytelling and gossip, sometimes it could color people's perspectives a bit and in a way that maybe they were getting a bit of misinformation or oftentimes immigrants would say, and attorneys would talk about this too, that it was difficult to understand why a family member, a relative, someone else was able to obtain relief from deportation when they couldn't. And it didn't quite make sense to them how the law seemed to work for some people and not for themselves. But that was primarily how they were navigating the system. Again, because there are limited access to resources and the way that I framed this from a theoretical perspective was in terms of the concept of legal consciousness or the way people understand and relate to the law. We all have different kinds of legal consciousness, the way that we think about the law, it's related to how we're socialized, it's related to our family structure, it's related to our professions, our education level, the media. There are all of these factors that influence the way that we think about the law alongside our identity. And so immigrants, in this case, they're not only sort of relating to the immigration court through two different frames that come together into what I call immigrant legal consciousness, because they're bringing their experiences with the law in their home countries, their experiences with legal actors, police, judges, attorneys in their home countries, as well as those in the United States. And oftentimes, through the stories of others' experiences, these vicarious experiences that help them make sense of the law. And how do these methods of understanding the law, this immigrant legal consciousness, how does that impact what they expect then from the law? Yes, and so this is what was always, this is always the surprise to folks when I talk about this too, at least other academics, to lawyers, immigration attorneys, not to immigrants themselves. But so shockingly, when I ask these questions about, specifically about the court process, about different legal actors in the courtroom, the judge, the attorneys, interpreters, again, often the vast majority of cases that are coming through immigration court involve interpreters, because most people are, their first language is not English. It's not the language that they're most comfortable in. When I asked immigrants about these different actors, how did they treat you? Did they treat you, you know, were they polite? Were they respectful? Did they seem biased or unbiased? Were they discriminatory? Did they listen to you? Did they explain things and running through the various questions that are related to this procedural justice concept or process fairness? Almost everyone I spoke to said, "Hey, the immigration court's actually pretty fair. The process is fair. The judges are respectful and polite. They're not corrupt, like in my home country. They explain what's going on. They listen to you. They give you a chance to tell your story, not like in my home country. The attorneys also, they were a little bit more not as positive about the attorneys as the government attorneys as they were about the judges, but they said the attorneys, everyone's doing their job. They're unbiased. They're respectful for the most part. This system seems very fair, and this is just shocking in particular to the immigration attorneys who framed the judges and the government attorneys as very, very biased, almost as if they couldn't not be biased, as not respectful, as very rude to their clients. The interpreters as very rude as misinterpreting things at times, but the immigrants I spoke to would say, "No, this process was fair. In my home country, I would never get this level of fairness or this level of justice in a court proceeding. In my home country, I deal with violence. I deal with corruption. I do not trust the government. I do not trust judges. I do not trust attorneys." Coming from this place where there's a breakdown in the legal system and in the legitimacy of the state, the expectations are actually pretty low for most immigrants when they enter the immigration court. Then what they receive, which to them seems like neutral legal actors who are impartial, who are unbiased, who listen to them, wow, that's incredible. It's very different than the attorneys who, I should say, are A, operating in a language that they're perhaps more comfortable in, and so may be able to pick up on things that folks who are operating in a second or third language might not be as attuned to and be the immigration attorneys have in mind how the law should work, the law on the books versus the law in practice, what's actually going on. The attorneys are going to hold the courtroom actors to the law on the books, what they think the law should be. For them, their expectations are not being met, whereas immigrants are coming to the court with lowered expectations already and are not necessarily as familiar with the formal law and the rights that they do have in court and aren't able necessarily to fully comprehend all of the communication that's going on, given that it's happening in a language that's not their primary language, they view it quite positively. Well, to be clear, this aspect is viewed quite positively, and this is so interesting to have you tell us about the contrast between what the immigrants, what sorts of things they were picking up on, where they polite, did they interrupt me, was I able to tell my story? And the attorneys talking about, well, but the book says this, they're judging it based off different things, but you do talk about how there are issues or grievances that immigrants have about US processes. If they're not these things around kind of corruption or violence, what are the grievances? Yeah, and so this is one of the things that was also very interesting to me, having spent so much time steeped in all the procedural justice literature, rarely if ever have I come across anyone else or any other studies that look at the question of time. And so when we think about process and you sort of take a step back, how could time not be part of the conversation when we're evaluating a process and our experience of that process? I think about, you know, I have two small children patients, something that's very difficult for them, and we're usually dealing with things as insignificant as how much longer until we're at the grocery store and having trouble waiting. The length of time can be very difficult. I know when I go somewhere like to renew my driver's license, now I can do it online. I used to have to stand in line and wait for extended periods of time. So even at the end when I walk out with my license, everyone was polite to me, but gosh, what was the most frustrating part of the process was the time it took. And so time seems to be absent from most procedural justice literature, but time was the thing that immigrants really honed in on as being unfair. The length of time, the amount of waiting, and the relation to instability, because when it comes to deportation, although it is possible for most not all individuals who are deported to eventually come back to the United States, you become eligible to request a visa again and return to the United States, for most folks, not all folks, after at least a certain amount of time. So I'm happy to wait 10, 20 years, but they could still request a visa. It's difficult to receive a visa once you've been deported from the United States. Moreover, many of these individuals are being deported to home countries that perhaps they were born in, but they do not know. None of their family lives there anymore. Their life, their family, their businesses, their education, everything is established in the United States. And that's in sort of a better case scenario, because in some cases, people are being deported back to countries dealing with extreme civil strife, with conflict, with war, with natural disasters, with rampant violence, gang violence, in particular in these Central American countries. And so deportation can really be a death sentence for some individuals. The stakes are very, very high. One of the former heads of the Immigration Judge Association in the US famously compared immigration court to being traffic court for the death penalty. It's like the stakes are as high as someone's life or death. And yet we're treating this as the civil court system as a sort of a traffic court scenario. And so for these individuals facing such serious stakes, when you tell them, oh, here's your your hearing is scheduled on the state. And that's in six months. So be prepared. Oh, actually, now we've pushed your hearing. We've pushed your hearing. Oh, and by the way, you may be waiting in detention during this time, maybe detained while you're waiting for your hearing to come. It could take years for people's cases. I started out with this project when I was doing my initial interviews in 2014, kind of the end of 2014 was when I first started reaching out to people to get to know them and do interviews. And initially, I was hoping that I could follow people's cases. And I couldn't, because there were so many delays in their cases, people were waiting years to have a final resolution to their case. And so that wait was seen as one of the most unfair parts of this process. And they would rather have an answer, even if it's not what they wanted sooner rather than later, so that they could get out of this sort of in between stat space, this liminal space where they're waiting in limbo to see what's happening in the next step of their lives. So that was the big issue in terms of process was time. How long people wait. And what questions does this raise about kind of fairness, you know, how do we judge these processes as being fair? Well, in terms of, I mean, that's one of the things that's so interesting when in this US, you know, procedural justice literature is coming from a US based like Western centric understanding of the law. And for the most part, a lot of the literature and the studies of procedural justice have been done in, you know, they haven't been very inclusive of different types of identity or different types of experiences. And they've just sort of assumed that everyone, regardless of who you are, where you were bored, what you do, the context of the process, regardless of any of those factors, will experience the law in the same way, and we'll have the same understanding of fairness, and what that means. And it's relation to legitimacy of the government, right, or sort of compliance with the law. And the thing I should say, while the immigrants that I spoke to said the court was procedurally fair, in terms of all the characteristics we look at, all the variables we're interested in when we talk about assessments of fair process procedurally, for the most part, there were a few folks who were outliers. Most of the immigrants said, yes, the process is fair, apart from this issue of time, which there was no concept really for me to, or no variables, connected to time in other studies that I had seen. So that was sort of the surprising new piece. What we would expect based on the procedural justice literature is that if you think the process is fair, you're going to be okay with the outcome, even if it's not what you wanted, you're going to comply with the outcome, and you're going to view the system as legitimate. And that's where it broke down. And that's where procedural justice theory fell apart in this context of immigrants going through the deportation process. Again, immigrants, I'm arguing, bringing a different type of relationship to the law and understanding of the law, this is what I call the immigrant legal consciousness, and also facing these very extreme possible outcomes, right? This is not a traffic stop. This is not, you know, a week in jail. This is not community service. This is deportation and potentially death, right? Or never seeing life, but never seeing your family members against. The stakes are quite high. And so it didn't matter to them that the process was fair, because they would not accept the outcome of deportation. In fact, about, I want to say a third, a third of the folks I interviewed had actually been through deportation proceeding before. So one of my criteria for interviewing people was that they themselves had to be going through a deportation proceeding, or have a family member currently in proceedings at the time when I when I connected with them. But again, a chunk of these folks, this was not their first deportation proceeding. They had been deported before and they had come back to the United States. They had not complied with that outcome before. And when I asked them, if you're deported again, are you going to comply? Are you going to leave the country and stay gone until you're legally eligible to return to apply for a visa and come back? And they said, no, of course not. If I'm deported, if I'm forcibly removed from the United States, I will return, even though the process was fair, because substantively, the immigration system is not fair, because substantively, it's unjust. There are fundamental issues of justice in the US immigration system from the this is from the perspective of the immigrants that I spoke to. And they're not about process. They're about the right to migrate. They're about our human rights, the right for people to move freely to have a safe life, to be able to take care of their children, to have access to education, to have access to health care. They really framed their substantive issues with the immigration system in terms of this human rights discourse. And so no level of fair process would would no level of fair process could overcome the substantive injustice they found in the immigration system. And no level of fair process or fair treatment in immigration court by the immigration judge or by the government attorney or the interpreter would make them accept a deportation outcome. It just would not. And so that's where my research really veers and has a different sort of different take than most of the procedural justice literature, not all, because I frame my work in terms of when I call a second wave of procedural justice research that's much more attentive to these issues of identity, place, context, and recognizes that, you know, a big part of how we make sense of the law and then consequently how we evaluate the fairness of the law or the legitimacy of legal system. It is social. It is cultural. And so of course it's going to be subjective. It's going to change. It's going to vary from time, you know, across time and across space. It's not static. And so I think that was one of the flaws with the earlier procedural justice researchers that it assumed were all the same. And we're all going to evaluate fairness in the same way when that's just not the case. So aside from a more nuanced understanding of fairness and how it's judged, what else do you hope scholars take away from this? Well, I certainly hope there will be more attention to immigration court in general. And it has received more attention, I would say, over the last five to 10 years, 10 years ago there were almost no one was talking about immigration court, no one in academic circles. Immigration attorneys were certainly. And so were immigration judges. But this is such a massive bureaucratic system with such high stakes that again is processing hundreds of thousands of people a year. With this million, three million case backlog, it's a very substantial system in the US. It can do a lot of harm. I think it could potentially do a lot of good. And so I would just hope that more scholars from all sorts of disciplines will do research on immigration court, particularly with people who are on the ground who are experiencing the court itself, whether it's laypeople or legal actors, immigration attorneys, interpreters, judges. It's difficult to do research with some of the folks who work for the government because they're not technically allowed to participate in this sort of research project. But to get these insights on the ground, particularly in the US context where immigration is so divisive and it is now always seems to be a huge part of our political debates of our upcoming election, for example. And so I think it's important to have a more nuanced understanding of how this system is working or how it's not working so that we can inform policy. So speaking of informing policy, what are the policy implications of this book? Yeah, that's a great question. Again, the book is centered around these concepts of procedural justice and legal consciousness. And I'm very skeptical of procedural justice and its value. Legal justice has been critiqued by some as a way to manipulate regular folks into complying with the law, even when the law is problematic, right? So it's sort of like if we give this, it's like a veneer of fairness. It's sort of superficial. The process seems fair. People treat me nicely. And I think, well, I guess the outcome's not so bad and I'll go along with it. And I guess there's nothing really wrong with the system. But underneath, you could have very problematic laws, very problematic legal systems. And so, you know, one of the most of reform that's frequently talked about, particularly among immigration activists and advocates and immigration attorneys, is providing indigent defense in the immigration system. So in the criminal justice system, if you cannot afford an attorney, the government will provide you with one. In the civil system, we do not have that same right. So an immigrant who was facing criminal charges would be provided with a free attorney, you know, a public defender or a state appointed attorney. But in the immigration system, you have a right to an attorney if you can pay for one yourself. And so what's often put forward as, I don't want to quite say low-hanging fruit, but a kind of practical, more easy to imagine reforms the immigration system is to provide all immigrants who can't afford an attorney, a free attorney and have this public defender system. I see that as a bandaid. I see that as a procedural measure that will likely improve due process, perceptions of process fairness in the court. But immigrants are already saying that the court is much more fair than they expected and much more fair than what they would have expected in their home country, certainly. And most immigrants are not eligible for relief from deportation. So even the best immigration attorney with the most resources behind them to work on a case will struggle to find relief for someone who simply is ineligible. And the way that our immigration law is written in the US is that most people who face deportation are not eligible for relief. The end. In no way do I oppose public defender systems or into defense as a concept. But we've seen as a criminologist I am optimal point out the public defender system is valuable, but it is flawed. And what I don't want us to do is to continue adopting flawed policies and practices from the criminal justice system that can be incredibly harmful and produce so much state harm and bringing those into the immigration system. Instead, the biggest policy take away from me, although perhaps it is a more difficult ask, would be to eliminate deportation altogether. I think we should abolish abolish deportation. It's an unnecessary, an unnecessary reality. There are alternatives that we could use when it comes to how we manage immigration in the United States, the bureaucracy, the money, the time, the surveillance, the collateral consequences of deportation for families, for communities. And many immigrants in the United States are part of mixed status families, which means it's not just immigrant families and immigrant communities. It's American, it's all of us, it's all of our families, all of our communities that are affected by this. I think deportation is substantively unfair and it no longer fits global understanding of both human rights and also borders. It doesn't make sense anymore in a modern world. And there are certainly alternatives that we could use to deportation. Thank you for taking us right from the beginning of this work that came out of your own work and public policy through the development of the research into the literature through your questions and your findings and now closing that loop all the way back to take of those things. I do, however, have one final question. Now that this book is out in the world for people to read, what might you be working on now? Yeah, so I have a few things that I'm working on, but one of the things that I'm focused on this summer is actually going back to some data I collected a few years ago with colleagues where we did a survey, a national survey of immigration attorneys from across the United States and interviews with them as well. And I'm interested in this question of cause lawyering and whether or not immigration attorneys are cause lawyers. So what draws attorneys or what draws individuals to immigration law as a field, what keeps them there and are they really motivated by social justice and by pushing forward new policies and reforming the immigration system, or are they motivated by other factors of the work such as supporting clients who need their help on a case by case basis, interest in working with people from different countries, different languages, the complexities and challenges of immigration law, again, being one of the more complex, nuanced areas ever changing areas of US law. So that's what I'm working on right now. Well, that sounds very intriguing and best of luck with what sounds like a fascinating data set. And of course, listeners can read the book we've been talking about again, titled the slow violence of immigration court procedural justice on trial published by NYU Press. Maya, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast. Thanks, Miranda. It was a pleasure to be here. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
