The Hidden Impact of Removal Proceedings on Rural Communities

Although the Immigration Courts with the largest backlogs of cases are located in large cities, the latest Immigration Court records show that when adjusted for population, many rural counties have higher rates of residents in removal proceedings than urban counties. In fact, of the top 100 US counties with the highest rates of residents in removal proceedings, nearly six in ten (59%) are rural. In these communities, residents facing deportation may find themselves in rural "legal deserts[1]" where there are few qualified immigration attorneys, longer travel times to court, and high rates of poverty.

The Immigration Court data used in this report was obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in response to its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).

Mapping Pending Immigration Court Cases

TRAC recently mapped the Immigration Court's current active backlog—over 1.1 million cases—to show the number of residents in each county who are awaiting their day in court. In this follow-on report, TRAC used the same data set to map the proportion of residents ("rate") with pending immigration cases as a fraction of total residents[2].

When the total number of backlog cases is mapped, urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago emerge as areas with large numbers of pending cases. This makes sense, because the total number of immigration cases is driven by the geographic concentration of large numbers of people in urban areas. However, when the number of pending immigration cases is mapped relative to county population, a different picture emerges. Many large urban counties are revealed to be more average, while many rural counties are shown to have much higher concentrations of removal cases.

In these rural counties, residents may have a heightened sense that immigration enforcement is impacting their community. This, in fact, would be an entirely rational perception since the odds are indeed greater.

Figure 1 below includes a map of the proportion of residents in each county currently in the backlog (top) and the total number of cases in each county in the backlog (bottom, reprinted from our previous report). The county-level rate is represented as the number per 100,000 residents who are currently in removal proceedings.

Particularly striking is how many counties in Southern California and the New York City-Boston corridor, which are prominent in the map of the number of cases, look more typical once population is taken into account. Also striking is how counties in the Great Plains regions from Southwest Minnesota to western Oklahoma pop off the map as places where higher percentages of the community are facing deportation proceedings today.

Figure 1. County Residents with Pending Immigration Court Cases
(Click for larger image)

To better visualize these differences, TRAC produced two additional maps in which we isolated and compared the top 100 counties from each map (see Figure 2 below). The top 100 counties by proportion of residents in the Immigration Court backlog are shown in blue (top), and the top 100 counties by the number of residents in the Immigration Court backlog are shown in red (bottom). A detailed list of these counties can be found at the bottom of this report in Table 2.

Figure 2. Pending Immigration Court Cases: Top 100 Counties
(Click for larger image)

Highest Concentration of Pending Immigration Court Cases Found in Rural Counties

Counties with high rates of residents in removal proceedings are far more rural than counties with high numbers of cases. Every single county in the top 100 counties in terms of number of immigration cases (shown in red) are urban, while just 41 percent of the top 100 counties in terms of rate (blue) are urban. In fact, the majority—59 percent—of the top 100 counties with the highest proportion of residents in removal proceedings were rural[3].

For several rural counties, the presence of a large immigrant detention center, which can hold hundreds of immigrants in pending removal proceedings, was a deciding factor in boosting them for inclusion in the top 100 per capita list. Lumpkin County, Georgia, for instance, a rural county in southwest Georgia which tops the list, had 414 with pending court cases. But Lumpkin County is home to Stewart Detention Center, one of the largest detention centers in the country. Of the 414, approximately 385 were held in custody there[4]. Like, Lumpkin, three other counties among the top ten—Frio County, Winn Parish, LaSalle Parish—also have detention centers. However, in the remaining six other counties in the top 10—Hamilton County, Parmer County, Colfax County, Nobles County, Bailey County, and Manassas Park County—court records indicated they were residing in the community and weren't detained.

Immigrants who are held at rural detention centers face barriers to justice over and above their non-detained counterparts. Obtaining the services of a qualified immigration attorney is even harder from behind the walls of a detention facility. When available, attorneys may charge additional fees for travelling to and from the detention center for consultations hearings. At the same time, arranging for the attorney to be paid while inside a detention facility adds additional challenges. Moreover, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, arranging access to medical services may be particularly challenging when a detention facility is located in a rural county. (See TRAC's recent report on how low rates of detainees with criminal records could impact ICE's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

TRAC Identifies 24 'Hot Spot' Counties

In TRAC's analysis of two groups of counties-those with high numbers of backlog cases, and those with high rates of backlog cases, 24 counties stand out as 'hot spot' counties because they showed up in both groups. These 24 counties have both very high numbers of residents currently in removal proceedings and very high proportions of residents in removal proceedings. Many of these counties are located in southern Florida, the greater New York City region, and the greater Washington, D.C. region. Notably, all 24 'hot spot' counties are urban counties. In Table 2 below, 'hot spot' counties are designated with two asterisks (**) at the end of the county name.

Footnotes

^[1] Pruitt, L., Kool, A., Sudeall, L., Statz, M., Conway, D., & Haksgaard, H. (2018). Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice. Harvard Law & Policy Review, 13, 15-156.

^[2] For county population counts, TRAC used the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates for 2017 available at https://www.census.gov/.

^[3] TRAC's designation of urban and rural relies on the USDA's 9-point Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC), most recently updated in 2013 and available at https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes.aspx. TRAC identified the RUCC for each county, and assigned the label "Urban" to those with "Metro" codes and classified the remainder as "Rural."

^[4] Numbers typically detained at Stewart are higher than this count would suggest. Some of these detainees may have already been ordered deported and are awaiting removal. For others, deportation proceedings may be purely administrative and bypass the Immigration Court altogether.