This article was republished
from our friends over at Court Watch
. Please consider subscribing to them if you want the early scoop on what's happening in our court system, from the concerning to the bizarre. Madeleine O’Neill is a
freelance reporter
in Baltimore.
Hundreds of
street arrests
that court records show disproportionately targeted Latinos in and around New York City. Detainees
shuffled across the country
one day before a congressional oversight visit. A
judicial emergency
in the Eastern District of California.
Each of these stories came to light because of habeas corpus — a centuries-old legal writ that has become a powerful tool for freeing immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation campaign. Because they’re public court filings, habeas corpus petitions also offer a window into the often cryptic world of immigration enforcement.
But there’s a catch. Across the country, the
nearly 50,000
habeas corpus petitions filed in recent immigration cases are public records only in theory, because a
2007 court rule
makes the petitions impossible to access online like most other federal court records.
The rule has hobbled attorneys, journalists, and researchers trying to gather information about arrests and detention in this unprecedented era of immigration enforcement.
“The effect is it takes much longer to get access to these records in a particular case and it makes it basically impossible to get records in a lot of these cases at once,” said Renee Griffin, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
“It’s a real nationwide problem,” Griffin said.
A new project called
Habeas Dockets
is working to counteract this roadblock with help from volunteers. According to the project’s founder, 400 people across the country have contributed court records to the site, which publishes habeas corpus filings online for anyone to read them.
Court Watch
spoke with founder John Kyle Cronan, a software d
… [more]
