Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Imagine a justice system built on rigorous evidence, not gut instincts or educated guesses about what works and what doesn't.
More people could access the civil justice they deserve.
The criminal justice system could be smaller, more effective and more humane.
The Access to Justice Lab here at Harvard Law School is producing that needed evidence. And this podcast is about the challenge of transforming law into an evidence based field.
I'm your host, Jim Greiner and this is Proof Over Precedent.
Welcome to another edition of Proof Over Precedent, the Access to Justice Lab's podcast. My name is Jim Greiner and I'm the faculty director of the Access to Justice Lab. I'm going to be acting as the host for today's podcast and I have with me two terrific guests who have recently completed a report on a study that they did for the VERA Institute. And let me ask y' all each to introduce yourselves. Jacqueline, starting with you, can you tell us who you are, are, and maybe a fun fact about yourself?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Sure. Hi, my name is Jacqueline Pavilon. I am the associate director of research at the Vera Institute of Justice's Advancing Universal Representation Initiative. VERA is an institute with a mission to end the criminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants and people experiencing poverty. And our initiative specifically has an ultimate goal within VERA to advance due process and ensure everyone at risk of deportation has an attorney by their side as they navigate their immigration proceedings while simultaneously shrinking the mask Civil Immigration Detention Network by training, I'm an economist and that's what my research is focused in. And I'll pass over to Neil.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Thanks, Jacqueline. Hi everyone, I'm Neil Agarwal, a principal data scientist at Vera.
A little bit about my background. I studied math and computer science in college, eventually went on to get a PhD in cultural anthropology after a somewhat meandering route that included time spent as a coder in industry.
And I'll just say as a fun fact, I enjoy mystery murder mysteries. So like books novels but also occasionally birthday parties. Although I was a murder mystery and
[00:02:12] Speaker A: my fun fact I was actually going to cycle back around to that my fun fact then Neil and we may have to have a whole separate conversation.
I'm a big hardball detective mystery fan and have just finished listening to my one of my absolute all time favorites Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, 1929 to help kick off the genre. It's something that I'm hoping to actually run a little reading group conversation on conversation group on this fall with some students is some of the hardworld detective stories. So do you have a do you have a book that you'd like to recommend everyone?
[00:02:45] Speaker C: I always go with Agatha Christie's but also a more recent author is David Gordon. He actually does the very much a take on the detective hardball genre. So big fan of his.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Terrific. And Jacqueline, can you share a fun fact with us?
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Sure. I'd say apart from working my entire career in economics and corporate math, I actually am a dancer and I love dancing as well as making music and writing poetry. So I'm a non math person outside of work.
[00:03:15] Speaker A: Terrific. And what is your favorite? Do you have a favorite type of dance?
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah, actually most of my time I spend Latin dancing in the salsa community and doing an urban genre called house. Terrific.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Terrific. Okay, so this study is about in a very broad sense, it's about the effect of having a lawyer versus not having a lawyer in immigration proceedings.
And but there are, as several podcasts that have already posted on Proof Over Precedent has clarified, there are a lot of different types of immigration proceedings. So let's start first of all, setting the stage. What type of immigration proceedings did y' all choose to study and at what procedural posture were they when you chose to study them? Because again, there could be multiple procedural postures. So just walk us through the basic setting here.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: So the main type of immigration proceeding and the one that we looked at in our study are called 240 proceedings, named after section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
So just Broadly, when the U.S. department of Homeland Security accuses a person of violating immigration law, then in certain circumstances that agency may initiate removal proceedings against the person.
And so these 240 proceedings encapsulate the process through which those charges are brought before an immigration judge and eventually adjudicated in an immigration court.
Now that aside, there are certain people who are ineligible for 240 proceedings, but who have demonstrated a reasonable fear of prosecution or torture in their home country. And they can be placed in what are called withholding only proceedings. And so here the judge can grant a more limited form of relief.
For our study itself, we only looked at individuals in 240 proceedings.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: The providers who we worked with, which are called a collaborative, the Midwest Immigrant Defenders Alliance. There are now seven legal service providers in the Chicago immigration Court jurisdiction area that came together, the founding Forward National Immigrant justice center, the Law Office of Cook County Public Defender, the Immigration Project, and the Resurrection Project. There's now more. They collaboratively decided that nobody would be ineligible based on the perceived merits of their case, or what is called merits blind, which is what set this up for quite a robust study. Everybody eligible is on the Chicago detained docket means they're detained in an immigration detention center and scheduled to be heard before the Chicago immigration court in detained proceedings. And the only kind of eligibility requirement is that they do not have an attorney already at the time of their first hearing and they meet an income requirement of just 200% of the poverty line or below. And the way that kind of works in practice is the attorneys just go to court on certain days of the week as they have capacity, offer this program to, as a friend of the, or sitting there in observation, offer it to all the people whose first hearings are that day. And if the person accepts in that hearing, they can adjourn their case to do a screening to seek counsel. And so that's what set this up for a really robust study.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: And so just to clarify again, for listeners who are not as familiar with the immigration process as say y' all are, there are immigration proceedings that take place with the, with the immigrant out of custody. And basically there's a date upon which the immigrant is supposed to show up at a courthouse or at an office. Again, because these are not, they're called immigration courts, but they're not federal courts yet, they're immigration judges. Is that correct?
[00:06:59] Speaker C: Yeah, and I can add too. So there are individuals who are detained at the start of their case can often have bond hearings which then, you know, they successfully bond out, then they're proceeding to continue under these non detained settings.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: And Neil, could you remind listeners what a bond is?
[00:07:17] Speaker C: Yeah, a bond basically. Is it based on a cash amount that is put up? Individuals are able to, instead of going through their hearings, detained, that they can continue without being detained. But then it's the bond is the collateral that, that's supposed to guarantee that they, that they show up for their hearings.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: So you basically deposit some money in a court bank account or in an official bank account and then you're able to go free. And if you don't come back, then the court keeps the money. If you do come back, you get the money back, even if you quote unquote, lose the case. That basically how it works.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: We actually, even though we're following detained proceedings, we do actually follow the outcomes through the non detained portions of people's case till their final outcome. So just to specify that, and so I just wanted to clarify that as well, even though we're looking at people who start in detention secondarily just with the intake model. Yeah, so this is a collaborative that obviously is working as hard as they can to reach as many people as possible, but they cannot due to capacity. Right. And they're attempting to grow their programs to do so. And so essentially they. These are remote settings, remote representation settings. All of these dockets and hearings are done through video technology conferencing.
And essentially what that means is they sign on to a, a Zoom or teams or WebEx linked and where that is being done. And it's essentially they are there as what's called a friend of the court.
How they decide what days of the week is relatively random based on like when they have capacity to go. There was more Mondays and Wednesdays, but not exclusively Mondays and Wednesdays. And it's just like when enough clients have fallen off of their caseloads that they have opportunity to take on more. And then they go and offer it to everybod whose initial, what's called an initial master calendar hearing or first hearing of their case is that day. And again, if the person is there as a friend of a court, the judge reads a little script that says there is an attorney here, if you want, you can adjourn your case and reschedule it to make yourself time to hear with them whether or not you want to participate in this program. The only thing that would disqualify somebody after that, the fact is if perhaps they actually did have a lawyer who was already signed on, but not at that case, or not at that hearing already, or they did not meet the eligibility requirement for the income requirement, that was extremely low. Most people who are detained are not receiving an income while in detention, as you can imagine. And it's. If you've made it to the. I accept a screening stage. Most people after that point in time continue to work with those attorneys and just.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Do you have any numbers on what fraction of people were turned out to be income ineligible?
[00:10:00] Speaker C: Yeah, 10 of them were because they had other counsel already and somehow managed to get into the screening process. Six other. The other six we listed as ineligible for other reasons, including the income ineligibility. I think the way that the data was collected through our partner organizations, that was just the most granular category we got. But I believe so it's at least under six and I believe it was probably closer to two or three of those individuals.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: So just doing back of the envelope here, it's about about six and a half percent of people who are ineligible for any reason and so percent or so income ineligible. Just to give an idea. So very small fractions of people turning out to be ineligible at all, especially for Income reasons. So the basic study design in terms of creating a group that where there's going to be an intervention, the intervention group is going to be the attorney offering the representation and then what I would call the business as usual group is going to be the days constituted of days in which the attorney is not there.
But could we just go over, first of all, am I right about that general setup? Is that correct about the general setup?
[00:11:07] Speaker B: That's correct. Yeah, that's the general setup. We obviously through the data, limited it. We can see through the data if somebody already has an attorney on their initial hearing. And so even on the days where people were the attorneys were not present, we can limit it to the eligible in the sense that we know the people don't already have an attorney with them. So it's really amongst that eligible in a sense that they don't already have an attorney at their first hearing. Comparing the attorney days to the non attorney days. That's correct.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: And so if we do that as kind of the day, as the unit of the comparison, the ideal situation would be to randomize which days over a set.
And so there. So educate me. Did were you able to actually randomize which days or was or were. You need to depend on an assumption that the days in which the attorneys showed up are essentially like the days in which the attorneys didn't show up.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: We essentially did. We did balance tests to see was there extreme differences across the days. We as. This was not a randomized controlled trial in the sense that we as the researchers were randomizing. It was about as close as you can get to an effective randomized control trial in the sense that the attorneys were just going on random days of the week. And then we instrumented in the first stage of our, of our methods using day of the week as the instrument and then ran the balance tests as one would to see if those days checked out.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: You used a term here, but I'd love to just get you to unpackage for listeners to. As a. I know what that means, but can you unpackage what it means for. For, for proof of precedent listeners?
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Sure. Essentially there are, let's see, to break it down. Essentially, if you're trying to say that this is in fact a random test, let's break it down to medicine for let's say a placebo effect. Some people get the medicine and some people get a placebo. Essentially. You can't really do that in a setting where people have free choice and it's not controlled by us, the researcher or the research Doctor, if you will. And so what you need is something else that's random, such as day of the week that kind of can proxy for the idea of getting your medicine or in this case getting your lawyer. Because people have the option to opt in or opt out of the program. That that random day of the week essentially serves as a proxy for the randomization that you would need as a researcher to make sure what you're not capturing is either the opt in or opt out effect of people who are maybe more willing to fight their case, are more willing to opt into the program or something like that. In fact, what we found was the opposite is that not that they're not more willing to fight their case, but perhaps people with more challenging cases were the ones opting into the program. And that's an analysis, we can see through this, let's say proxy analysis of a first stage or instrument.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Okay, super. So then, so we in terms of just building up here about we get to the set of people who have said, yes, I'll take the meta representation.
We have then a set that, that includes about a six point or on a day when a media attorney shows up, we've got about, there's a set of people who are going to be on the master calendar for that day.
And then we lose a very small number of about 6.5% to ineligibility. Right. So some already have attorneys and some are ineligible for some other reason, but probably a very small number prob for income. And then Mita says would you like to do, would you like to discloses about the study? Gives them information about the study and says would you like to be represented? And then so do we. And then so approximately what fraction again doesn't need to be exact, actually what fraction ends up saying yes, I'd like to meet an attorney to represent me.
[00:15:01] Speaker C: Yeah. So I can actually give you the exact answer. It ends up being about 3% decline services. And so this is to say they've been through the screening, they've paused their master calendar hearing, they've been informed of what the program is. So what we found is really most of them are interested in the process.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Let's to clarify, there's kind of a two step, there's at the court, the judge offers it and then if they want, they meet with an attorney who offers it again and explains it in more detail at the courthouse. Just to specify in order to participate in this program, people have to adjourn and postpone their case. One thing to note is that people who are in detention are facing extremely challenging and difficult and dehumanizing conditions. And so many people do not want to adjourn their case or simply feel they cannot. And so as a function kind of of the intake model, in order to accept the representation they would have to prolong their time in detention a bit. Right. I think 56% accepted at that initial stage. And then people go on to a kind of screening program from there. And that opt out rate was actually something we noted as this is kind of an area where we're losing people. And through interviews and other things we realized it's because people are having this detention fatigue as we call it. And after the pro, after the study finishes, actually the providers decided to change their intake model to a referral system to actually try and catch people earlier with the same merits, blind values in the sense that they don't refuse people based on the perceived likelihood of winning. They still accept anybody but just trying to do it through a more referral based system to catch people earlier in their case so they, they wouldn't have to prolong it.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: To start from the beginning, we have the attorney shows up on the day. We lose around 6.5% of people in terms of showing up on the day because they're ineligible. Typically either having an attorney or income judge announces and says there's a program here, let us tell me if you'd like to be involved in that. And then we have the remainder call it at this point something like 50 ish percent of the people who were there at the, on the initial master calendar calls a little bit less at that point. They're the ones that are going to have the conversations with the meda attorney. And then Neil, you said that there might be some, some, a small number refusing at that point.
[00:17:32] Speaker C: There's also people that show up on their master calendar hearing with already having a lawy. And so they.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Of course we got those. Yeah, yeah, got it. And then what sort of services were the media attorneys able to provide? What could they do for people?
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Sure, the, the media attorneys are really hardworking and overworked people who are doing amazing work. Truly. They're, they're salt of the earth. They, they work as a collaborative and so essentially they could speak way better to their work than way we can. But I think one of the interesting things that we found, and maybe this is like a preview of the, the studies as media attorneys develop, people correctly identify the forms of relief for which they're eligible and then effectively litigate them.
The nice thing about this collaborative structure that they have across the different agencies is that maybe if some, some attorney in one organization has more knowledge about one type of case or proceeding than the other, they can triage their knowledge through knowledge sharing channels across Slack or trainings to really build up the knowledge base and help across agencies, which I think has been in terms of capacity building, a really strong model. They also have cooperation with different grassroots agencies who can help with situations in which perhaps somebody is released outside a detention center in the middle of the night in Kentucky and they can call someone to make sure that person gets a ride home, for example. So also in providing other sorts of ad hoc services, they do also provide other legal assistance. What we're looking at in this case is the specifically or in this study is specifically around their case outcomes and their bond outcomes and the numbers of motions and applications that the attorneys are filing to make sure that the cases are proceeding as they should.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: And so then, for example, are the lawyers drafting affidavits to say, this is why, for example, I have a credible fear of persecution if I'm returned to my home country?
They're identifying which sorts of legal eligibility there are, what the eligibility criteria there are for asylum there are they. Those might be two examples that I can think of that could also think of perhaps appearing at a bond hearing and making an argument to a immigration judge that says my client, if my client puts up this amount of money which they can afford, then that will effectively guarantee that they'll show up. When you set the hearing in the case. These are the sorts of things that lawyers were doing
[00:19:57] Speaker B: essentially. Yeah. They hear their client's story, they understand what avenues for relief might be possible for them, they inform them of their rights and their possibilities. Right. One thing that was important to note, and I think something really powerful about this case is lawyers cannot create a right for people to exist where they one does not exist. They simply help people understand their options and defend them. And so when you think about the context of these findings, it's important to note that the filling of applications and motions to ensure people can collect the necessary evidence and have the time to defend their case essentially is what these, these attorneys are doing and, and with quite a bit of success.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Superb. So then, okay, so then let's go back then to figure out how, how we're going to construct a business as usual group for comparison.
So obviously we've got the days upon which the media attorney is going to show up. And Neil, you just told me that after the various screenings we're going to end up with meta representation of about 20% of the folks who are on the master calendar for a particular day. And then obviously I'm guessing that in order to construct a comparison group to try to figure out what the effect of the meta attorney is, you're going to begin with days in which the meta attorney did not show up, Is that right? And then what are you going to do after that?
[00:21:22] Speaker C: Yeah, so I can say in terms of comparison groups. And so we really had two data sets that we're working with. One is comes directly from the immigration courts and obviously includes both people who are media clients and anybody else. And that's released directly by the executive Office of Immigration Review. It's all anonymized. So you don't actually. There's no way to tell the actual individual or any identifying information from them. So there was that and then there was the data that we're getting from the media attorneys about their clients. And so to construct the business as usual group, as you put it, what we ended up doing is actually including not only individuals on the non observation days, but also the non meta clients on the observation days.
And so in order to do that, what we actually had to do was in a sense identify the meta clients in that anonymized data.
And so we used a lot of different kind of algorithmic approaches to do that. We can get into that later. But the idea being that we took this data set and out of it we could pull out here are the meta clients and here are the non meta clients. Some of course because they were on different days of the week, but also others because we were able to identify through this kind of algorithmic process that those are not in fact meta clients that are in the data.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: So when you say identify with the algorithmic process, that basically means you had to re identify people, is that right?
[00:22:44] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Okay. And, and so then you create a comparison group, a business as usual group.
And again that's going to include people on meta days that did not end up being meter represented and non meta days did you imply, is that right? Sorry, Jacqueline, let me just ask, is that correct?
[00:23:03] Speaker B: So for the intention to treat effect, it's just comparing kind of the people who were essentially on, who were on the meta days versus not on the meta days. And then for the treatment effect in the treatment group, it's the people who took up the program compared to anybody else. And so there's two analyses done. One we're would you would think of as the impacts at scale. If you were to scale up this program. What are the impacts of this program existing in your area at all? If you could offer it and touch everyone and that's comparing the meta days to the non meta days and then within that the subset of that analysis is treatment effect on the treated or those who were offered it and decided to participate. And that's the impact on clients. Right. What are lawyers actually able to do for their clients?
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Okay, and so let's focus on the first one because I think that's statistically I think that's the cleanest in the sense of it requires my cleanest. That's not bad word. But you poor choice of words requires a fewest assumptions or fewer assumptions. Right. The, the, the. The there you're going to say people on meta days versus people not on meta days. But let me just clarify is that all people on meta days, including people that didn't end up being meter represented on the meta days to everyone on the non meta days or was it only the the meta represented people on the meta days and some attempt to reduce the the process the non meta day that they would be the fol than meet a represented had me to have shown up on that day. My question making clear here, one says just the people on the ME todays no further treatment. Just the people on the non meta days, no further processing. I should say no further processing of them. The other one is we're going to try to narrow. Narrow it down a little bit. Which one was it exactly?
[00:24:56] Speaker B: The first. So just if you were offered, if you were on the day and offered it versus you're not on the day and offered it, it's not narrowing it down further, just you're on the day or you're not on the day. The only narrowing we did is you amongst the eligible. Right. You had to have been eligible for the program and so that's they only offered it to people who were eligible. But even on the non the non attorney days we can see who is eligible through through the data whether or not they had an attorney present and given the other eligibility requirement of income weeded out very few people we felt pretty comfortable saying then just an okay comparison.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: When you say eligible the primary determinant of ineligibility that you're able to see in the data is that they already have an attorney. Is that right? Yeah, Correct. So basically it's everyone not already having an attorney on the ME today versus everyone not already having an attorney on the non meta day, is that right?
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: And that's what we're going to compare okay, and then what are. What is it in a very broad sense? Because I know some of these outcome variables that you're measuring had multiple potential categories in them because of the. The number of different ways that a. An immigration case can proceed and the way that it can. That can quote, unquote, end or end for the purposes of media representation. Those are two different things. But there's a lot of different ways an immigration case can end. But let me just ask what, in a broad sense, what are the outcome variables? What are the sort of top two or three or one outcome variable that you're going to study?
[00:26:30] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: So they're, let's say, bulked into four categories. The major ones, of course, are whether you are granted relief. And relief is, let's say, the very important case outcome that allows you to remain in the United States permanently with full protection from removal or at least grants you that right. There are other interim case outcomes that say that don't require you to leave the United States, but they don't necessarily grant you that same full protection. Something like this might be withholding of removal or a case dismissal or termination where the judge says, you know what? This is not a priority case.
We're going to close it off the docket, but you don't necessarily receive any sort of protection or status from that case. And so when we're creating our outcome variables, we wanted to know two things. Right. One of them is did you get that really strong form of relief versus anything else? Right. And then the other variable of outcome we looked at is did you receive, more generically, any outcome that would allow you to remain in the United States at least temporarily, versus any outcome that would require you to depart the United States? Right. And that's a more broad definition. And obviously those measure different things, and we wanted to measure both of them. The other categories we looked at were bond outcomes. So whether or not you were more likely to have a bond hearing, be released on a bond set by an immigration judge or be released on ice's discretion. This is outside of the bond hearing process. Whether ICE decides to release you through paying a bond set by ICE or other forms of discretion. We also looked at the numbers of motions and applications of different types of that the lawyers are filing, and whether or not there were more hearings in the person's case, it's prolonging a case. We didn't find any results in that category. We don't really present it too much. We present it, but it's null. So as the first thing, I think to Note is a lot of these outcomes are quite rare.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: From what to what?
So from a non meta day to a meta day, what is a non meta day rough percentage and what is a meta day rough percentage?
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Uh, I don't have these numbers off the top of my head but I essentially think it would be roughly if for I think it was something about for every a hundred client media clients and a hundred non meta clients the percentage point might jump from something around 12 to 14ish something around there. And so that was I think in terms of people numbers what it translates into is it's essentially the risk ratio is essentially it's a 20% increase in the number of people who would remain in the United States just by receiving the kind of offer of treatment, not necessarily people who would take it up. And essentially because these legal service providers have now changed their treatment model, obviously the take up is quite higher. Right. Because there's not as much opt out at massive Pallander hearing. And so that increase in take up would also change this outcome because this outcome is reliant on take up. And so I think that's why it's. It also is important to note the treatment effects on the treated as well or the clients themselves. And I think that's an equally important metric to measure in terms of being allowed to remain in the United States. Just pulling up my numbers here in terms of the ones that I have on deck in terms of being allowed to remain in the United States, in terms of treatment effects on the treated, we did not find exactly statistically significant effects.
But in terms of being granted relief specifically, that really needy outcome for the meta days versus non needed days, we again found a 2.2 percentage point increase. But for the clients themselves, the ones who chose to participate, it was an 8.1 percentage point increase, which feels huge. So even though let's say the numbers of people within the United who get to remain in the United States is increasing a little bit within that number, the share of those who is being granted relief specifically is actually increasing quite
[00:30:47] Speaker A: a bit and again remain in the United States versus relief. Relief means for in a colloquial sense things could always change. In a colloquial sense you're done right? That means legally it's the case is over and they're not going to come after you again. Usually again things can be wacky these days, but you're done right? Whereas, whereas being able to remain in the United States but without relief means you're okay for now, but it's temp. But the legal designation is it's temporary, I think, something we're going to either take a look later or if the status in the home country changes, we may come back and see you or something of that nature. Does that capture a difference?
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah, and so essentially that does capture it. And so while kind of the overall number of people being allowed to remain in the United States generically is increasing within that share as well, the share of those who is being granted relief specifically is also increasing. So that that's quite significant. And so in terms of I would say the importance of having a lawyer is not only in being allowed having people remain in the United States, but having people remain in the United States specifically with more more powerful legal outcomes that really establish their right to remain as, as members of communities and societies.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: So we're going to be coming to a close here in terms of the time that we have. Neil, tell me what other sort of things about the outcomes jumped out at you. What do you what else would you like to share with proof over precedent Listene about the outcomes of the study?
[00:32:15] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. I'll reiterate something that Jacqueline said earlier, which is really that what we found is that really this is a due process issue. The effect of having a lawyer in these cases is really to allow people to receive the sort of right outcome of their case or the what the law, the kind of protections that the law grants them based on their situation. And when we talk about something like the likelihood of being relief as increasing fivefold, what it really means is that without an attorney, it's those people who would otherwise have been deported are people. It's not that they suddenly are being a right for them to stay is being created, but it's that the just outcome or the outcome that is that they are afforded based on the law is being found through the help of this representative Super.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: And then Jacqueline, I'll ask you the same question. So we got through some of the really fundamental results.
There are many other results and lots more detail presented, especially in the technical report or the technical appendix. I forget whether it's called a report report or an appendix, but I read through it. Jacqueline, what other sort of takeaway messages would you big picture takeaway messages would you want to share with listeners?
[00:33:19] Speaker B: I have a few. I think in terms of the technical results, just a few things stand out. One thing is that we didn't find first of all that meeted clients had more applications filed on their behalf for relief even though their chances of being granted relief were 4.7 times higher. If they were meet the clients. And so I think that that's showing that they are not superfluously filing the wrong application. But lawyers are really instrumental in identifying the proper forms of relief and it can also lead to the more efficient and as Neil was saying, just outcomes secondarily in the technical realm to contextualize this, not necessarily everyone in our comparison group is unrepresented, right? So it means they were unrepresented at their master calendar hearing and may have later decided to obtain counsel. In fact, many did. And so in terms of a clean comparison, we did it cleanly in this way, but it's not necessary. We still found these quite robust results even though our comparison group still did have some people who went on to find later counsels. That's also showing the impact of early intervention and early council as well.
I'd like to also indicate again that this is through detained proceedings only. And so you could imagine how much stronger these results might be if it was through also non detained proceedings.
This is a growing movement to increase funding at a state and local level for publicly funded deportation defense across the country. There's more than 70 jurisdictions that publicly fund deportation defense, especially as many public funds for it are being cut or challenged. And with that challenge and that termination of federal funds and the increased investment elsewhere comes increased accountability that is necessary to show the effectiveness. And I think that's what this program does. But I think it's less so about numbers and more so about people. I personally decided to get into this after meeting someone going through their own real struggle with their legal case. And I was 19 and it inspired me to dedicate a career towards this after seeing the injustice of it. And I cannot stress enough that as much as we're talking about numbers and technicality, it is. It's more so about people and I just want to stress that.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: Terrific. Nir Agarwal Jacqueline Pavlon thank you so much for spending time with Proof Over Precedent listeners and we will of course be post putting the links to the reports, the executive summary, the technical appendix on the blog post that will accompany podcast that will summarize the podcast. Really appreciate Yalls time and thanks so much for sharing this work with us.
[00:36:11] Speaker C: Thank you so much.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Proof Over Precedent is a production of the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School.
Views expressed in student podcasts are not necessarily those of the A J Lab.
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Here's a sneak preview of what we'll bring you next week.
I'm excited. We have four of us here today, including me, to talk about a study that the Access to Justice Lab very much wants to pursue.
