Tracking the U.S. Government Through Its Reocods: Findings on Law Enforcement, Immigration, the IRS, and the Courts

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that 63,721 "unaccompanied" children -- children who crossed the border alone seeking refuge -- had cases pending in immigration court at the end of October 2014. Of this total, only 20,691 have lawyers; the rest must represent themselves. TRAC developed an online data tool that allows users to examine the outcomes of deportation proceedings against unaccompanied juveniles in each state and to aggregate those outcomes based on whether the child had representation or not. TRAC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center, based at Syracuse University, dedicated to providing timely, pertinent, and authoritative information about the workings of the federal government. Its immigration offerings, thanks to support from the Four Freedoms Fund, are free and open to all. For many of its other projects, TRAC issues free reports and then provides subscribers with custom data tools they can use to mine the data themselves on TRAC's servers. The TRAC Fellows Program allows scholarly researchers access to special data abstracts.