Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

An understudied issue that addresses aliens is those aliens that have appeared in both immigration court and the federal criminal justice system. In this project, we link data from the Department of Justice's Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) (i.e. immigration court) with federal arrest, pretrial detention, prosecution, sentencing, and imprisonment data reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics Federal Justice Statistics Program. We intend to describe alien personal characteristics, criminal and immigration arrests, charges, and convictions for those aliens that enter both the EOIR and the federal criminal justice system, the federal criminal justice system only, and the EOIR only. We will also describe the sequence of immigration court and federal criminal justice events for aliens involved in both. This study sets a framework for further study of the causal effects of innovations in immigration enforcement and its effect on the federal criminal justice and immigration court system.