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Explainer

A Refutation of EOIR Analyses of the Legal Orientation Program for Detained Adults¹

March 21, 2025

The Legal Orientation Program for Detained Adults (LOP) was established in 2003 under the Bush administration as a pro se2 support program that gives people in immigration detention the legal information they need to represent themselves in court. Since its inception, studies have consistently demonstrated the cost effectiveness of LOP.3 Immigration judges have long recognized LOP’s efficacy in educating respondents about their legal options and diverting them from applying for relief for which they are ineligible and reducing the incidence of frivolous filings.4 DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has also credited the LOP with “improv[ing] the efficiency of immigration court proceedings by increasing access to information … for individuals in proceedings.”5  

EOIR Acting Director Sirce Owen, in a recent policy memorandum (PM 25-15), erroneously cited a 2021 EOIR study6 to conclude that LOP is “wasteful.”7 However, that is not what the 2021 study concluded. Instead, the study, which was only released publicly after the PM was issued, closes with recommendations to improve data collection and to conduct further research.8 The EOIR PM also relies on an earlier report from 2018, which uses a research design that does not allow it to make casual statements about the impact of LOP services on cost differences between LOP and non-LOP respondents.9  

In fact, neither report cited by the EOIR PM provides causal evidence to support its claims, and the 2021 study explicitly states this. Moreover, the way these reports go about measuring LOP costs, case times, and detention stays is methodologically flawed, as detailed below.  

The most recent and methodologically rigorous analysis of LOP case times comes from a 2018 Vera Institute of Justice report, which concludes that LOP participation leads to faster case completion times.10  

The findings of the Vera Institute report, as well as findings from an earlier 2008 report by the Vera Institute, provide evidence that LOP is especially effective in reducing processing times for the kinds of cases that are driving the current court backlog,  including: asylum filings, cases involving respondents  who are not eligible for relief (many of whom file no applications for relief), and cases involving both released and detained respondents that have been pending for relatively long periods of time (ranging from a matter of months, to two or more years). 

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Recommendations

The contents of this memo support the following recommendations.  

  1. Acacia concurs with the closing recommendations of the 2021 EOIR report, which observes that before any conclusive decisions can be made about the effectiveness or cost efficiency of LOP, it is necessary to conduct additional research, using more rigorous methods that are supported by enhancements to LOP contractor data collection. 
  2. Any further research on LOP programs’ effectiveness and cost efficiency should
    1. focus on the impact of LOP participation using appropriate measures of efficiency and effectiveness, 
    2. deploy causal models that control for relevant intervening variables and assess LOP impact by comparing “like” cases, and
    3. include cases of all lengths in its sampling framework.
  3. Any further research should be conducted using a transparent data sharing arrangement that allows both EOIR and the LOP contractor to access all data used for the analysis and to participate in the review of research design and findings; as well as allowing for the participation of third-party reviewers, at the government’s discretion. 

The main points of this memo are summarized below, followed by a more detailed treatment of each point that compares the methodology and findings of the EOIR reports to the reports issued by the Vera Institute (the former LOP contractor).  

Finally, please note that this memo focuses on the methodological flaws of the 2021 EOIR report. A few observations on the limitations and flaws of EOIR’s 2018 and 2019 reports on LOP are also cataloged in an appendix at the end of this memo.  

Main Points

  1. The 2021 EOIR report acknowledges that none of the EOIR analyses of LOP have established a causal relationship between LOP and government spending on detention or the immigration courts. The only recent evaluation of LOP that has presented a robust, causal analysis is the 2018 Vera report on LOP case times.11 
  2. The 2018 EOIR report yielded unreliable measures of LOP case times because it did not control for intervening variables and did not compare “like” cases. Meanwhile, the 2021 EOIR report completely abandons the analysis of case times and similarly does not attempt to control for intervening variables, which leaves the 2018 Vera Institute report as the most robust recent analysis of the impact of LOP on case times.12  Moreover, the Vera Institute is the only entity, besides EOIR, that has had access to the data that is necessary to conduct an analysis.
  3. The 2018 Vera Institute report’s treatment of pending cases allowed it to highlight an important aspect of LOP case processing efficiency that was overlooked by the EOIR studies. Vera used a multivariate, explanatory model that accounted for the total amount of time all pending cases had been open to date. Using this methodology, the Vera report was able to show that LOP cases reached the 50% closure mark three times faster than non-LOP cases. In other words, half of all LOP cases closed by 140 days, while it took non-LOP cases more than three times as long (421 days) to reach the same mark (amounting to average case-time savings of over 250 days per case for LOP cases).13 
  4. Both the Vera Institute and EOIR reports have shown that LOP has been successful in reducing  in absentia rates for people released from detention. Even so, recent EOIR reports fail to acknowledge that reduction of in absentia rates is one of EOIR’s longstanding goals for improving immigration court proceedings.14 The 2021 and 2018 EOIR reports also inappropriately include cases with in absentia orders in their estimates. This is problematic because cases with in absentia orders are shorter, meaning that the success of LOP in ensuring participants continue to appear at their hearings, all else equal, increases case times. But all else is not equal, and reducing case times by increasing in absentia rates should not be viewed as a Success. 
  5. The 2021 EOIR Report does not account for the non-random distribution of LOP facilities in its assessment of detention costs and stays. In particular, the report does not account for the fact that LOP is typically assigned to larger facilities with acute legal support needs, and that there are many attributes of these facilities that are beyond the control of LOP providers, which can distort cost efficiency estimates if not taken into account.