Potential Impact of Immigration Raids
Targeting Women with Children

The Obama administration's recent announcement of immigration raids targeting women and children has sparked heated debate. While the administration says that "individuals who were the targets of these efforts were subject to final orders of removal by an immigration court," many have criticized this move as overly aggressive given this highly vulnerable refugee population.

Immigration rights groups have further questioned whether proper consideration was given to these cases before removal was ordered, since so few families had legal representation or the ability on their own to navigate the country's complex immigration laws and procedures. TRAC previously reported that the odds of being allowed to remain in this country were increased more than fourteen-fold if women with children had representation in Immigration Court proceedings.

ICE has not released figures on the number of families that could potentially be targeted in future raids. However, according to the latest available court records, a total of 18,607 individuals in the "women with children" category have been ordered removed by immigration judges during the last 18 months under the court's new priority docketing system. This system was first set up in July 2014 to expedite the processing of these family cases.

Of these 18,607 removal orders, fully 16,030 or 86 percent were issued for cases in which the women lacked any legal representation.

These latest figures involving "women with children" are based on an analysis of case-by-case information by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. For this analysis, TRAC obtained court records current as of the end of December 2015 from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Removal Orders by State and Hearing Location

Almost half (47%) of all removal orders in these cases have been issued by immigration judges based in just two states: Texas and California. In Texas, 88 percent of these removal orders were issued to women and children without any legal representation, while in California 82 percent of these orders were issued to families without an attorney.

As shown in Table 1, there are 20 states in which courts have issued at least 100 removal orders involving women with children.

Table 2 provides further details by court hearing location. The largest number of removal orders for these families (3,369) was issued by the Immigration Court based in Houston, Texas. The second largest concentration of removal orders (2,079) occurred in the court based in Dallas, Texas. Next came the Immigration Court based in Los Angeles, California with 1,392 removal orders, followed closely by the Atlanta, Georgia immigration Court with 1,334 and the Charlotte, North Carolina court with 1,322 such orders.

More detailed information providing the results of TRAC analysis by representation, nationality, outcome as well as court location is available through our updated free online query tool Priority Immigration Court Cases: Women with Children.