Executive Office For Immigration Review: Caseload Performance Reporting Needs Improvement
GAO-06-771
Published: Aug 11, 2006. Publicly Released: Sep 12, 2006.
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Highlights
Within the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge (OCIJ) is responsible for managing the 53 immigration courts located throughout the United States where over 200 immigration judges adjudicate individual cases involving alleged immigration law violations. This report addresses: (1) in recent years, what has been the trend in immigration courts' caseload; (2) how does OCIJ assign and manage the immigration court caseload; and (3) how does EOIR/OCIJ evaluate the immigration courts' performance? To address these issues, GAO interviewed EOIR officials; reviewed information on caseload trends, caseload management, and court evaluations; and analyzed caseload data, case completion goal data, and OCIJ court evaluation reports.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Executive Office for Immigration Review | To more accurately and consistently reflect the immigration courts' progress in the timely adjudication of immigration cases, the Director of EOIR should maintain appropriate documentation to demonstrate the accuracy of case completion goal reports. | The Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) evaluates the performance of the immigration courts based on the immigration courts' success in meeting case completion goals. EOIR reports this information in its internal quarterly case completion goal reports. However, we found a recurring inconsistency between reports as well as other inconsistencies. For example, the number of cases awaiting adjudication at the end of a quarter was not the same as the number of cases awaiting adjudication at the beginning of the following quarter. Although EOIR provided several reasons for the inconsistency, we could not replicate the past reports to determine the accuracy of... the case completion goal data. EOIR did not maintain the individual queries used to run the prior quarterly reports; it only maintained the current set of queries. The inconsistencies indicated that EOIR should maintain appropriate documentation to demonstrate the reports' accuracy. We recommended that the Director of EOIR maintain appropriate documentation to demonstrate the accuracy of the case completion goal reports. In response, in a memo dated September 28, 2006, EOIR instituted a policy requiring documentation behind the quarterly reports be maintained so that prior reports could readily be rerun, as the need arises. When changes to the compilation criteria behind the reports occur (e.g., adding new categories of exemptions), the old reporting format would be maintained as well as the new reporting format. EOIR also compiled a chronology of the changes made to the case completion goals that would be updated as changes are made to the criteria in the reporting of the case completion data. In addition, in February 2007, EOIR issued additional standard operating procedures for generating the case completion goals. As such, EOIR should have documentation that shows how the case completion goal reports were developed and that demonstrates the accuracy of the reported data.
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| Executive Office for Immigration Review | To more accurately and consistently reflect the immigration courts' progress in the timely adjudication of immigration cases, the Director of EOIR should clearly state what cases are being counted in the reports. | The Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) evaluates the performance of the immigration courts based on the immigration courts' success in meeting case completion goals. EOIR reports this information in its quarterly case completion goal reports. We found that in developing the reports, EOIR decided to exclude from the measurement certain categories of cases that, due to extenuating circumstances, were not expected to be completed within the established timeframes. As a result the number of cases covered by the quarterly reports was less than the total court caseload. Additionally, depending on what cases are excluded from the case completion goals, the...
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Topics
Courtroom proceedingsCourts (law)ImmigrationImmigration and naturalization lawPerformance measuresProgram evaluationStrategic planningCase managementPolitical asylumImmigrants