Giving Compass' Take:

• Research from the Institute for Defense Analyses reveals how much providing legal representation for unaccompanied alien children would help and cost. 

• What role can philanthropists play in increasing access to legal representation in immigration courts? 

• Learn about the backlog in American immigration courts. 

Over the past decade, the number of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) arriving at U.S. borders has risen dramatically, to an average annual level of 50,000 during fiscal years (FY) 2014–2018. UACs now account for a significant fraction of the flow of unauthorized migrants to the United States. An issue that has been the subject of much debate is whether these children should be provided with legal representation in immigration court at the government’s expense. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded the Institute for Defense Analyses’ (IDA’s) research to develop objective, rigorous estimates of the impacts of UACs having access to counsel on their case outcomes and immigration processes and capacities, and to estimate the monetary cost of an expansion of access to counsel.

We estimate these impacts using administrative immigration court records for UAC cases initiated during FY 2008–2016, and we use insights gained from interviews with NGOs providing access to counsel to refine our statistical methodology, which controls for challenges that arise in assessing the impact of representation on outcomes (selection bias and data censoring.) After estimating the historical impacts of representation, we then evaluate a counterfactual policy scenario, in which the representation of UACs is increased to a level of 100 percent at the beginning of all cases during the historical period of FY 2008–2016. Our results suggest that an expansion to 100 percent representation would have had the following impacts:

  • The success rate for UAC cases would have increased by at least 22 percent.
  • The rate of UACs in absentia would have fallen by at least 22 percent.
  • The failure rate for UAC cases would have remained roughly unchanged.
  • The overall number of UAC immigration court hearings would have fallen by 6.7 percent, because a rise in the number of hearings due to fewer in absentia outcomes and more hearings per case is more than offset by the elimination of a larger number of hearings that were historically adjourned to find counsel.

We then use data on key representation parameters and costs obtained from NGO interviews to develop an estimate of what the monetary cost of expanding representation to 100 percent for cases initiated in FY 2008–2016 might have been. We estimate the cost of this expansion at $157 million for FY 2008-2016, with the estimated annual cost rising from $4 million in FY 2008 to $33 million in FY 2016 as the number of cases increased.

We also assess the role of NGOs in coordinating the provision of social services to UACs, which benefits UACs, their families, and the communities in which they live. We are not able to quantify the benefits of these services due to lack of data. The cost of providing these services to all UACs is estimated at $4 million per year on average during FY 2010–2016, rising from a level of $1.2 million in FY 2010 to $9.7 million in FY 2016.