I have spent most of my academic career trying to understand the immigration court system, both from a data perspective and through the slower work of sitting in a courtrooms, interviewing immigration attorneys, and studying the trajectory of individual immigration cases. The first time I saw the inside of courtroom was years ago in North Carolina with Marty Rosenbluth, and it changed how I understood deportation. I realized for the first time that there is (or was) an entire legal process behind it rather than a simple matter of being picked up and put on a plane. Detained immigration court is the hardest part of that process to see, and in many ways it is the black box of the whole system. These are civil proceedings and yet they take place inside an ICE facility where few people have access.
Professor Rebecca Galemba at the University of Denver created the DU Court Transparency Project with a vision of documenting immigration court hearings with academic rigor and with the goal of having a scholarly and public impact. I wanted to talk to her and her students about their work because it raises so many important questions, from how to access detained courts, how to reliably document court hearings over time and across a rotating cadre of volunteers, and what her students are seeing first-hand inside the detained court in Aurora. And just as important, I wanted to know what drew Rebecca and these students to the work and what they wished more people knew.
I’ve respected Rebecca’s work for a long time even though I’ve only recently had the opportunity to get to work with her more closely. She is a professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs and co-director of the Center for Immigration Policy and Research, and she is the principal investigator of the Court Transparency Project. Ella Iveslätt is the project manager and lead research assistant, a 2024 DU graduate who built the project’s database and its public dashboard. Jasmine Salgado Simental is a lead observer and an undergraduate at DU who grew up in Aurora, and Jennifer Gutierrez Marquez is a research assistant and a graduate student at the Korbel School. Jasmine and Jenni both came to the work through their own families’ experience of the immigration system.
Much of what we talked about is simply how hard it is to document a place like this at all. Observers cannot bring in phones or laptops, so everything is captured by hand on paper and reconstructed later, which is why Rebecca built the project around a small, well-trained team that stays with it and can be retrained as the rules shift. She described building and rebuilding their methods as the government kept changing its practices, and learning to record both what a judge decided and the exact language used to reach it. The building itself sets the tone before a single hearing begins. Ella walked us through the entrance at the Aurora facility, which is run by the private prison company GEO Group, where the skylights are covered with a painted image of the sky and the walls are lined with awards and value words like “accountability” and “character” despite the dissonance with what actually goes on there.
A lot of the conversation was about the human weight of the hallways and courtrooms. The students described families kept apart from the people they came to support, the confusion of respondents who do not understand what is being decided, and Jasmine’s observation that the only real difference between her and the person in custody can come down to a uniform. Latina students described being mistaken for respondents when observing in immigration courtrooms. Several of them were drawn to this work through their own families’ journeys through the immigration system, and that history is part of why they stay with something this demanding. The idea they returned to most is that this system depends on not being seen, and that understanding it begins with people who are willing to sit in the room and pay attention, then communicate that out to the public through writing and presentations like this one.
Jenni had a powerful encouragement at the end that I 100% agree with:
“Most courts across the country should be public, so if anywhere in your area is public, please go bear witness. Bearing witness, even if you might not understand all the complexity of legal jargon, will teach you a lot.” —Jenni Gutierrez
If you can visit an immigration court, do it. It’s one of the best learning experiences you’ll ever have. It is harder to get into court these days, with the agency creating new barriers to entry and flooding the courts with mega-masters hearings where respondents themselves can barely fit into court. But if you can go with someone who knows the ropes, don’t miss the opportunity.
Watch or listen to the discussion above. I learned so much and I’m sure you will, too. Huge thank you to Professor Rebecca Galemba. Her projects illustrate the value of impact-driven scholarship at a time when skepticism about higher education is at a high. And she is, no doubt, doing a lot of invisible labor mentoring students and collaborators into this work—for which I have tremendous appreciation and admiration. Don’t forget to share this conversation with others so we can spread good information.
00:00 — Opening and introductions
4:50 — What inspired the DU Courtwatch and Court Transparency Project
12:01 — How the students found their way into the work
20:16 — Why detained court is the black box of the immigration system
21:07 — Walking into the Aurora facility, from the parking lot to the courtroom
33:24 — How identity shapes who gets questioned in the room
34:32 — Turning courtroom observation into data you can defend
38:06 — What dismissals and pretermission actually mean
45:40 — The findings on bond, jurisdiction, and who is detained
49:02 — Mandatory detention and “weaponized incompetence”
52:30 — Where the project goes next
57:57 — What the team wishes the public understood
Rebecca Galemba is a professor at the University of Denver and a colleague of mine who has studied immigration from many angles for years. Trained as a qualitative researcher, she leads the DU Courtwatch Project, which grew out of a smaller court watch effort she built with attorney Christina Brown of the Colorado Asylum Center around the Biden-era dedicated docket in 2022 and 2023. She also runs a wage theft research project with immigrant workers, and much of what she described is the invisible labor of mentoring students into this field and keeping a small team trained well enough to document a moving target.
Ella Iveslätt is the project manager of DU Courtwatch and a recent University of Denver graduate who started on the project as a student observer in 2023. She is the team’s quantitative lead, and she wrote her undergraduate thesis on the project’s dedicated-docket data under the Biden administration, with Galemba as her advisor. She first found her interest in immigration law in a high school class at the University of Chicago, and she is now applying to law school with a commitment to stay involved in immigration law in some capacity for her career.
Jasmine Salgado Simental joined the project in 2023, and her interest in immigration law began in a freshman course called Deportation Nation taught by Professor Lisa Martinez. She grew up in Aurora, where the detention facility sits, in a family and community shaped by immigration. She was drawn to the work by the lack of transparency in the courts and by a desire to make what happens inside them legible to the general public rather than only to people in academic spaces.
Jennifer Gutierrez Marquez, who goes by Jenni, came to this work through her own family. Her parents began their immigration process around 2010, and it took roughly a decade of lawyers and hearings before they became permanent residents now working toward citizenship, with Jenni often translating for them along the way. She worked in higher education before her master’s program, and she started with Galemba on the wage theft research project before joining the courtwatch team, where she found the legal impact she wanted to have for her immigrant community.
Explore the data yourself. The Court Transparency Project’s Phase One dashboard and charts cover the Aurora detained court, with an updated version through June on the way. Look at the numbers on bond, jurisdiction, and representation and see what the team documented one hearing at a time.
Go bear witness. Most immigration courts are open to the public. If there is one near you, you can sit in for a day as a curious member of the public. As Jenni said, bearing witness will teach you a lot even if you do not follow every piece of legal jargon, and nothing explains how the system works better than watching it.
Support or join the project. You can reach the DU team at ducourtwatch@gmail.com, and there are ways to follow and get involved on their website. Attorneys and advocates who want to be interviewed are especially welcome.
Read the “no jurisdiction” write-up. Ella and Rebecca’s piece for Immigration Law Unhinged lays out how a jurisdictional finding is used to keep people detained.
Learn more about the courts. I have a whole section of the Substack newsletter with detailed discussions of the immigration court system going back several years at austinkocher.substack.com/immigration-courts. Visit those posts to learn more about policy changes over time, what the data says, and to find additional resources and readings.
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