Immigration, Legal Status, and Criminal Adjudication in State Courts

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Immigration enforcement has fundamentally altered the criminal justice system in the United States, yet we still lack information on basic questions regarding noncitizens in the legal system, particularly in state and local jurisdictions. For instance, what proportion of arrested noncitizens are prosecuted? For what charges? What proportion are sentenced to jail or prison? Our lack of knowledge on these questions is consequential given that the majority of incarcerated non-U.S. citizens are in state prisons and immigration enforcement increasingly takes place in partnership with local criminal justice authorities. As a result, the decisions made by local police, prosecutors, and judges often determine both the criminal justice outcome and the immigration case outcome. Thus, understanding how local criminal justice actors use this discretion is fundamentally important for understanding current criminal justice practices and contemporary immigration enforcement. The lack of knowledge on the local criminal processing of immigrants is largely due to data constraints, in that information on foreign-born or legal status is rarely available in most state court databases. This project addresses this limitation by leveraging unique criminal history data from California and Texas - the two largest immigrant destinations in the U.S. - which tracks criminal cases from arrest through sentencing. Specifically, this project uses detailed case information on all arrests in California and Texas between 2006 and 2016 (~26 million) from the California Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) program and the Texas Computerized Criminal History System (CCH). Because both the CORI and CCH datasets include information on foreign-born status for arrestees, this project will be the first to provide even descriptive information on the case processing of immigrants in the contemporary United States. This inquiry is motivated by a central research question: Do otherwise similar citizen and noncitizen arrestees caught engaging in the same criminal conduct receive different case outcomes? Using the CORI and CCH data, this project investigates this question at multiple key stages in case processing, such as the decision to charge, the type of charging offense, and incarceration outcomes (e.g. prison, jail, or no imprisonment).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.