Judicial Business: Statistics and Reports
There is a plethora of interesting statistical data available from the U.S. courts website. I’ll admit that I was ignorant of this fabulous data set until recently. I learned about this resource from reading the footnotes from Ingrid Eagly’s forthcoming paper The Movement to Decriminalize Border Crossing.
Data from this website was incredibly useful to me today. I covered the topic of crimmigration. While I teach a standalone crimmigration course, I include in my podium immigration course brief (one-class) coverage of 1325/1326/1324 and employment issues.
For example, the website includes this excellent chart about what crimes defendants are charged with in federal court:
As you can see, immigration crimes have been popular for a good five years, but they are now the most commonly charged crimes. As the website details:
The biggest numeric growth was in filings for defendants charged with immigration offenses, which increased by 7,478 (up 37 percent) to 27,916 filings and accounted for 32 percent of total criminal filings, making this the largest category of defendants prosecuted in the district courts. Defendants charged with improper reentry by an alien climbed 40 percent to 23,250, and those charged with improper entry by an alien rose 48 percent to 254. Immigration filings in the five southwestern border districts increased 39 percent to 21,781 and equaled 78 percent of national immigration defendant filings (up from 77 percent in 2017). Filings grew 66 percent in the Southern District of California, 65 percent in the Western District of Texas, 27 percent in the District of Arizona, 24 percent in the District of New Mexico, and 17 percent in the Southern District of Texas.
I also found this table instructive and used it in class, clipping it in this manner:
There’s a lot to unpack here. For example, you can see that immigration offenses account for a smidge over 32% of criminal cases, that over 97% of defendants are convicted, and that of those convicted, over 99% plea guilty.
Perhaps you’ll find this data useful for your next article or your next class.
-KitJ