Will New EOIR Director Jean King Fix Agency's Data Issues?
In the fall of 2019, just as I started at TRAC, we identified significant data issues at the EOIR, the agency that oversees the immigration court system. Specifically, the agency appeared to be losing (deleting? misplacing?) digital records related to asylum and other forms of deportation relief.
This is a huge problem.
As I told Sandra Sanches this week for her article titled “Immigration trackers want transparency, better data management; judges press for autonomy” in Border Report:
“The real problem is the American people and policymakers should know and have a sense of how many people are applying for asylum relief and the outcomes of those cases. It’s really just a fundamental transparency and accountability issue and with those records missing it was presenting a very incomplete picture and potentially undermining the agency’s ability to monitor itself.”
When we noticed the issues, we reached out immediately to EOIR Director McHenry and offered to work with the agency to fix the issues. They initially ignored us, then stonewalled us, and then eventually dismissed the issues outright. Because we went public with the data issues, the agency did eventually restore many records (without explanation) but not after we had to pull our tool offline for a few months.
But the issue has not been resolved. Each month more records go missing and we keep track of these records on our asylum tool. Currently, that number is up to nearly 9,000 missing records.
This past week, however, EOIR Director McHenry resigned from his position, and a new director, Jean King, will take his place. With a new director to head the nation’s immigration courts, we are hoping for more transparency and better data management from the incoming administration. We certainly plan to reach out and offer to meet with the agency at their convenience.
My hope is that the agency will realize that we have a shared interest in fixing these issues since this isn’t just about making sure our data is complete and accurate, it’s also about making sure the agency itself isn’t inadvertently deleting incredibly important records.
Read all about the problems we found (and continue to find) with the EOIR’s data by clicking here, which will take you to our reports.
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