US Immigration Courts and Pro Bono Legal Services

While on a Fall VOLbreak for the University of Tennessee Knoxville and learning about the US criminal justice system and mass incarceration, I was introduced to  Adelante , a nonprofit legal help center centering on immigrant rights in Knoxville, TN. When we were on Zoom trying to decide long-term volunteer possibilities with the nonprofit, Adelante's Executive Director noticed that I had a map in the background and I then told her that I was a Geography major. This sparked an instant idea: mapping out the distances between pro bono legal help providers and immigration courts. She explained that this was such a big issue that it's one of the core inequalities that Adelante seeks to address. As their website states: "the organization emerged in response to a shortage of legal services available to immigrants in deportation proceedings. This shortage is likely unsurprising, considering that the immigration court is in Memphis —several hours away and on the opposite end of the state."

This geographic imbalance of resources can mean  life or death  in some situations for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers that are at risk of deportation. Sending those seeking refuge and safety within the United States back to the place they fled is harrowing problem that needs to be addressed at the national level. But that's a conversation for another time.

This StoryMap attempts to address the following research question:

To what extent are pro bono legal service providers actually accessible to immigrants in the US?

Because even though there are people and organizations who want to help immigrants, they are often overloaded with cases because demand is so high and supply is so low. To show this, I will present maps showing the number of immigration courts and pro bono legal service providers in the US (excluding states that do not have immigration courts) as well as a map showing the

The geographic location focus of this storymap is the contiguous US. The map below illustrates the original problem that Adelante strives to solve: the shortage of legal help providers in East Tennessee. The purple pushpin on the map is Adelante, and the yellow amoebas surrounding the handcuff symbols are an hour drive time buffer around ICE detention facilities under the jurisdiction of the Memphis Immigration Court in Memphis, TN. Notice how all of TN's providers are close to the court, which obviously makes sense, but in reality, it creates even more difficulties for immigrants who sometimes aren't able to legally drive to their court date, or drive to get legal help.

The data for this project was easily accessible through federal websites that have to properly document detention facilities, pro bono legal service providers that are federally registered, and federal immigration courts.

The pro bono legal service providers are listed here:  https://www.justice.gov/eoir/file/probonofulllist/download .

It should be noted that I did not count the American Bar Association Detention and LOP Information Line that is listed for the majority of immigration courts because I only counted the resources that had a physical address.

The immigration courts are listed here:  https://www.justice.gov/eoir/eoir-immigration-court-listing 

The ICE detention facilities were actually a bit trickier to find than I thought it would be. I ended up finding a spreadsheet that was requested by the National Immigrant Justice Center in 2017 through this  map  made by Freedom for Immigrants. The link to the spreadsheet is here:  https://immigrantjustice.org/ice-detention-facilities-november-2017 

I was inspired by the Freedom for Immigrants map ( https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/map ) but I wanted to add more dimensions to it that I think are important in helping understand the issue of accessibility to these resources.

Data compilation: I took the justice.gov website tables and transcribed them into usable spreadsheets, and reorganized the spreadsheet for detention centers so it only included the addresses of the centers. I exported them as .csv files so I could upload them properly as points in ArcGIS Online.

GIS analysis:

• Create Drive-Time Areas: I used this tool to calculate the 1 hour buffer around courts and detention centers in the following maps. I selected 1 hour as my time limit because I feel like 1 hour is a reasonable time frame of accessibility and anything more would be strenuous on other resources. I used the travel direction of "Away From Facility".
• Summarize Within: I used this feature to summarize the amount of points within a state. The polygon layer I used was a simple state border layer from ESRI and I calculated the number of pro bono legal service providers, immigration courts, and ICE detention facilities within state borders.
• Join Features: I used this to join together my attribute tables so I could consolidate my data into one table in order to have a single pop-up to configure. My target layers depended on which layers I was trying to join, but I always used "choose the fields to match" and usually would find a common denominator in both of the tables to go off of.

I drew a lot of inspiration on the actual analysis part of this project from  lab 5  of Geography 311 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, taught under Michael Camponovo.

First up is a simple bivariate thematic map showing the relationship between number of pro bono legal service providers (which I will refer to as PBLSP from now on because whew, that is a mouthful) and immigration courts within US states that have at least 1 immigration court in the state. As the shade of the circle grows darker, the amount of immigration courts increase. Likewise, as the size of the circle increases, the amount of PBLSP increases. For example, we can tell that Texas and California have both lots of courts and lots of providers.

The following map is a choropleth map that is based on the ratio between the number of PBLSP to immigration courts (# of providers / # of courts). I used a diverging map scheme with the ratio 1:1 as the middle. We can see that a red state means there are less than 1 provider for every immigration court, and a blue state means there are more than 1 provider for every immigration court.

This next map shows the drive-time radius of 1 hour around each immigration court. The darker the shade of the amoeba, the more providers exist within each 1 hour boundary. The courts that don't have an amoeba around them have no providers in a 1 hour drive radius.

For the final map, I created a "trivariate" map with a layer showing the number of immigration courts illustrated with a choropleth and the bivariate symbol layer from earlier depicting the number of courts and providers. I hoped to illustrate the dire need for legal help in all states, because even though there are a lot of providers in say, Texas, there are also a lot of detention facilities, and hence a lot of detainees in dire need of assistance.

The darker the shade of the state, the more facilities exist within the state. And like before, the darker the shade of the circle, the more immigration courts, and the larger size of the circle, the more PBLSP.

I hope I was able to shed some light on the issue of accessibility of legal help to immigrants who are detained with my maps. If you are reading this and are moved to do something, please consider  donating to the National Immigrant Justice Center , whose work deeply impacts the ensuring of legal protection for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers within our nation's borders.

Cover Photo by  Nitish Meena  on  Unsplash