Covid-19 Related Immigration Filings

Early in the pandemic, Theresa Cheng and Joanne Choi joined the project as co-leads of our Immigration Detention Team. In addition to tracking COVID cases and deaths in ICE facilities (an effort that has since been folded into our core data collection: https://uclacovidbehindbars.org/ice), they initially sought to create a data set of court filings related to COVID in immigration detention. For a variety of reasons, it proved very hard to get details on case filings. (In addition to standard legal research techniques, efforts included general outreach to advocates with requests for case information, along with targeted outreach law professors running immigration clinics). Ultimately, we realized that we would be unable to achieve anything like a comprehensive data set. Still, given the challenge of identifying court cases in this space, we thought it worth making available the information on the cases the Immigration Detention Team was able to identify. Additional immigration-detention related filings are also available as part of our Health Is Justice Litigation Hub (https://healthisjustice.org/litigation-hub/).