Congratulations to Lorena Avila Jaimes and co-author David Ibañez for publishing a research article titled: "An Expensive Pass to Freedom: Bond Amounts Trajectories in Immigration Court" in Sage Journals.
Lorena Avila Jaimes is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. Her career involves Colombia and Latin America’s state-building and peace-keeping initiatives, working in projects related to comparative international criminal justice, human rights and transitional justice. She worked as Project Manager of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung’s Rule of Law Programme for Latin America, as a researcher for the Toledo International Centre for Peace, and as a consultant for non-profit and government agencies. She has taught at different universities in Colombia as Universidad de los Andes, Universidad del Rosario, among others. She is a political scientist with a master's degree in public policy from Universidad National de Colombia. She holds an LLM in international law and human rights and a MSc in victimology and criminal justice from Tilburg University in The Netherlands.
This article focuses on thousands of immigrants who are in civil detention awaiting case adjudication in the United States. Unguaranteed legal representation and stringent access to bond hearings restrict their chances of release. Though the institutional purpose of civil detention and bonds in Immigration Court is to secure safety and the public good, the authors find contradictions in such purpose: increasingly high bonds are mandated regardless of individual circumstances, in a context of legal violence, or the loss and uncertainty experienced by a subclass of individuals scrutinized by the law, characterized by heightened criminalization, scarce legal protections, and broad judicial discretion. Jaimes and Ibañez use bond case administrative data from the Executive Office of Immigration Review between 1991 and 2020 in a multivariate analysis that centers on the influence of criminal records and legal representation to get lower bond amounts granted. The researchers find that criminal records predict risk before 2001, but after, individuals with no records are also mandated to pay higher amounts to Immigration Courts. After 2001, legal representation’s influence on reducing bond amounts is subtle but relevant. The article analyzes these findings in light of policy changes and provides evidence on how increasingly high bonds fracture social and economic determinants of immigrants’ well-being by altering their economic stability while they and their communities also suffer the psychological and physical tolls of detention.
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