Data, Stories, and Justice: My Keynote Remarks at the Immigration Law & Justice of New York Gala
Seven key statistics reveal how our immigration system has been weaponized against vulnerable people—and why we must become the institutions that hold our democracy together.
Reverend Paul Fleck, executive director of the Immigration Law & Justice of New York (ILJNY), generously invited me to provide the keynote address at the organization’s recent 26th Anniversary Gala. ILJNY is a project of the United Methodist Church that provides legal support to immigrants and refugees in New York City, an organization on the front lines of providing compassionate welcome to among our most vulnerable neighbors.
Rev. Fleck was an excellent host. The evening was filled with stories of the amazing work that the ILJNY has done over the past year. I had the good fortune to sit across from ILJNY’s managing attorney TJ Mills and meet their growing team of attorneys, staff, and interns. I got to meet reporters Fisayo Okare and Eileen Grench during the visit and so many other friends and colleagues I have only known as online avatars or inside the boundaries of a Zoom window. It was just the kind of celebration that reinvigorated my soul at the one-year mark since the 2024 election.
I have reproduced my keynote remarks below with some light editing to improve flow and clarity. Please support the ILJNY or another immigration legal service provider near you.
Please support the ILJNY or another immigration legal service provider near you.
Data, Stories, and Justice: Seven Numbers That Define This Moment in Immigration Enforcement
Introduction
For the last fifteen years, I have been studying immigration enforcement in the United States. One of the things I often say to clarify my work is that I study immigration but I don’t study immigrants. What I mean by this is that I focus on institutions of power rather than the people who are marginalized and oppressed by that power. It matters that we take our time and spend our gaze looking at these institutions, understanding how they work, because only then can we challenge them, dismantle them, or transform them. Understanding systems of power is not merely an academic exercise. It is about ensuring that families stay together, that people have protection, that the work of justice can continue even when the machinery of the state seems designed to produce the opposite outcome.
Although I work with data and spend considerable time making government systems more transparent, this work is not just about numbers. I do this because I believe in transparency, because I believe that whatever you think, whoever you are, wherever you’re from, even how you vote or however you view the political system, we all deserve to understand how our government systems work so that we can participate responsibly in the democratic process. When we don’t have that information, we cannot participate at all. But it is also true that the work is not just about numbers. It is about the stories behind the numbers, about what those statistics represent in human terms.
Like many of you here, part of my motivation comes from a background in faith. I was profoundly shaped by my experience in the Mennonite Church and oriented in this tradition toward principles of love, forgiveness, welcoming the stranger, and hospitality. The kind of hospitality I learned was not about opening the door to screen everyone who comes in. You open the door first. You get to know someone first. You invite people in first, rather than applying rubrics that exclude rather than welcome.
The values I was steeped in, however, are not the values of the current administration. We have seen the Department of Homeland Security tweet out images of a whitewashed suburban 1950s America, claiming this is the homeland they are defending when they deport immigrants. They make absurd and unverified claims about the people they are policing, not because those claims are true or even because the administration believes them to be true. They know the claims are false. They have the data themselves. They do it because they know that if they were honest about what is actually happening, that they are deporting fathers, mothers, and now teenagers, many more Americans would oppose rather than support what they are doing.
In less than a year, we have seen the reopening of Guantanamo Bay to hold immigrants in detention. We have seen unlawful deportations to a black box prison in El Salvador. We have seen the complete demolition of the refugee program, except for one group: white South Africans, who are allegedly oppressed and who remain the only group allowed entry. We have seen attacks on birthright citizenship, attacks on immigration attorneys who are viewed as enemies of the current project and who have been stopped and detained at the border when returning from work with their clients. We have seen attempts to make English the official language, as though the country would be better served by linguistic uniformity rather than the rich multilingualism that defines so many communities. Here in New York City, we witnessed an ICE sweep on Canal Street that scooped up numerous people, allegedly because they were dangerous, though we know that is not true. What it leaves behind is a legacy of fear.
One of my favorite sermons from Martin Luther King Jr. is his lecture on the tough mind and the tender heart. We must be tenderhearted in our work, understanding stories and remaining relationally driven. An organizer I worked with for years in Columbus used to say that change moves at the speed of relationship. We need relationships if we want to see change. Change does not happen simply because we hope for it. But we also, as Dr. King said, must have a tough mind. We must be willing to face the truth so that we have the information and knowledge we can use to challenge these systems. What follows are seven numbers that I believe are essential to understanding our current moment.
The first number is 325,000. That is the number of people in New York City who currently have pending immigration and asylum cases in immigration court. New York City has more pending immigration and asylum cases than anywhere else in the country, making it the center of the question of what we are going to do about welcoming the stranger. These are people facing deportation right now, people who deserve support. This is one of the largest backlogs we have seen in the last twenty years, and it represents both the magnitude of the challenge and the urgency of the moment. And it represents why it’s so important to support the work of Immigration Law & Justice of New York.
15
The second number is fifteen. If you are an immigrant facing deportation in immigration court and you have an attorney, you are fifteen times more likely to be able to stay in the country lawfully than if you do not have an attorney. Fifteen times. That statistic alone tells us something profound about how the system operates and about the difference that legal representation makes. Yet alongside this reality, we have seen a decline in the rates of representation. New York, because of the legacy of organizations providing immigration legal services, has traditionally had quite high representation rates, but that number has been declining rapidly. It has dropped ten percentage points just in the last year.
100,000
The third number is 100,000. That is how many people facing deportation right now do not have access to legal representation. When attorneys take on these cases, they do much more than provide legal expertise. It is not simply a matter of finding a good legal argument or putting in a strong application. Attorneys text their clients the night before hearings to remind them where they need to go, which train to take to make sure they arrive on time rather than missing their hearing. They connect people to other social services, pointing them toward food banks, churches, and places to get clothing. It is much more than just legal services. There is a tremendous amount of invisible labor that lawyers perform, work that I have observed closely over the past fifteen years of studying lawyers and lawyering in the immigration system.
80%
The fourth number is eighty percent. That is the current denial rate for asylum cases in immigration court. When this administration began, about forty-five to fifty percent of asylum cases were denied in any given month. It was roughly fifty-fifty. Now, four out of every five cases are denied. This is not because the cases have become less meritorious. It is because this administration has policies in place that bias judges to deny rather than approve. The current Department of Justice has built a denial machine, a rejection machine in the immigration courts, that is designed to turn out denials. What this means in practical terms is that attorneys must push harder, be more strategic, do more research to convince judges that cases are meritorious. The work has become exponentially more difficult not because the facts have changed but because the system itself has been recalibrated toward rejection.
45%
The fifth number is forty-five percent. That is the portion of ICE arrests in June, during the summer surge in arrests, that involved immigrants without any criminal history. A couple of weeks ago, Raffi Charuhi, a seventy-nine-year-old U.S. citizen in Los Angeles, was body slammed to the ground by ICE officers who raided his car wash. He had been standing in front of his business trying to tell them that everyone there had papers, asking to sit down and have a conversation, offering to show documentation. Instead, they knocked him to the floor, and when he ran outside to try to stop the raid, they threw him to the ground. He is now suing for fifty million dollars, which means taxpayers will foot the bill for those misdeeds. These arrests have become more and more visible and more and more violent.
But the violence is not limited to cities. A farmer in upstate New York told me and my colleagues, who were conducting research on immigration enforcement in rural agriculture, that the biggest challenge right now is labor. If workers are carted away, it would essentially kill the farm. The administration likes to justify its actions with claims that immigrants are criminals, but the facts tell a different story. Over the summer, there was a massive surge in ICE arrests in Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere across the country. This surge was driven by people who had no criminal background whatsoever.
When I make this distinction about criminal background versus criminal charges and convictions, I am not suggesting that our criminal legal system is not also deeply broken. It is. But the administration’s claim that they are going after the worst of the worst simply does not add up, and those are not my numbers. That data comes directly from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If you look at the data on a graph I published online recently, you can see how many people were arrested without any criminal convictions from May through July. The line goes straight up. Meanwhile, the lines representing people with other criminal histories remain completely flat. This is not a political opinion. It is simply what the government’s own data shows. Nearly half of all arrests over the summer were people without any criminal convictions, people like the high school student in the Bronx who was arrested during his ICE check-in just a few days ago and who will soon be deported to Guatemala.
36%
The sixth number is thirty-six percent. That is the portion of people in ICE detention who were arrested by ICE who have no criminal history at all. We have seen the massive growth of immigrant detention across the country. New detention centers have cropped up. Detention centers are now being opened on military bases. According to data from ICE, which does not even include arrests near the border, a third of people in detention have no criminal history at all. If we include the total number of people, including those arrested at the border, the figure is closer to fifty percent. No matter how we look at it, about half of the people arrested and about half of the people being held in immigrant detention should not be there. They should have a pathway to legal status.
And it is not going to get better. It is only going to get worse. Congress and the President gave ICE forty-five billion dollars, even as they tried to cut SNAP benefits for people most deserving of government support. They have funded a government bailout program for private detention to expand immigrant detention over the coming years. This matters because all of the factors I have already described about why this work is so hard become exponentially harder when a person is held in a detention center in Louisiana, Texas, or western New York rather than being able to walk into an attorney’s office. The growth of detention, combined with the rise in asylum denials and the changes to immigration court procedures, is not just about ramping up the usual operations. It is about building a system where people decide it is not worth fighting. It is about making people give up and go home.
7,500
The seventh number took effect the day after I gave this talk. The administration set refugee admissions for next year at 7,500 people, the lowest number we have ever had in our country. By far the lowest in history. Just two years ago, it was over 100,000. And it remains unclear whether they will even use all 7,500 slots or who will count as part of that number.
Generosity is Resistance
What does this mean for families? Less than two weeks before I delivered this speech, I drove to the airport in Raleigh, North Carolina with my friend Fidel, his wife Jenny, and their two daughters, Mackenzie and Isabella, both of whom are in high school. When I arrived in Raleigh, I drove to meet them at a soccer tournament where the daughters were playing. Fidel and Jenny have been married for almost twenty years, and Fidel drives his daughters to soccer practice for every session. He is there for every game. He is the only parent recognizable to every single girl on both teams. When I showed up, they told me they were in the stands, and it was not hard to find Fidel. He was standing two-thirds of the way up the bleachers with a horn, yelling, clapping, cheering on the girls as they played their matches.
But because Fidel does not have a path to legal status, even though he has been married to a U.S. citizen for twenty years, his family decided together that it was better for him to leave and for them to figure out what their family would look like as a cross-border family, a separated family, rather than risk him ending up in detention. I did not even mention the horrors we have seen in detention over the past year. Pregnant women are now detained in record high numbers. There have been record numbers of immigrant deaths in detention this year, at least twenty, if not many more.
So what does this mean? What does it mean when our institutions fail us? What does it mean when the institutions that are supposed to protect our democracy and liberty fail to do so? I would argue that we will do what we have always done as people of faith, as people who believe in justice and liberty and in welcoming our neighbors. We must become the institutions that hold our society together. We cannot count on the Department of Justice to hold ICE in check right now. We may not be able to count on the Supreme Court to maintain even common sense, even what we would have thought possible five years ago. But I do believe, and we have seen this at every point in history, that when we face tremendous odds, people come together. They give. They make hard decisions about how much to contribute of their time and resources to ensure that the institutions we still control, the institutions we can still change and influence, remain strong enough to hold the fabric of democracy together.
It may seem like the cancer of racism and hatred toward immigrants is metastasizing through our institutions, but it is not time to give up. We must keep fighting. I hope these data points help us orient ourselves to this moment. Data by itself, and story by itself, is not a path or a map. It is simply a compass. To put wind in the sails, we must come together and practice generosity as a community. We must invest in the institutions that are still here with us, our faith communities, our churches, and organizations doing this essential work.
I want to leave you with one final thought from history as I contemplate the way in which history sometimes cycles. One of my favorite thinkers and writers is Hannah Arendt, a well-known Jewish philosopher who spent much of the 1930s in Germany before she left. She wrote a marvelous essay published in the context of the civil rights movement but reflecting on the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. One of the things she said is that in moments where democracy seems to fall apart, people’s morality falls apart. The idea that one has values and shared moral frameworks often disintegrates. She remembered people who espoused certain values one week and then threw them to the wind the next, participating in violence of unspeakable proportions.
But she also said that the people who refused, the people who did not participate, made the difference. It was not because of high morals or values in some abstract sense. It was because they said, “I could not live with myself if I participated. I could not live with myself if I, in any way, took part in what was going on.”
Given where we are now, given not only the risk and the danger but also the opportunity we have to maintain the institutions that still stand, I think it is worth asking ourselves: How could we live with ourselves if, at this crucial moment in history, we did not give all we could to protect what we have?
Protecting what we have, protecting our institutions of democracy, means supporting the work of Immigration Law & Justice of New York and other organizations across the country that provide crucial legal services at a time when they are needed the most.
