Temporal Expertise and Lawyering Roles in U.S. Immigration Courts

How do attorneys strategize for their clients when they lack the legal tools necessary to serve them? I interview removal defense attorneys working in U.S. immigration court, a system that deports individuals without procedural protections found in other court systems and obscures their pathways to remaining in the U.S. To better understand how they strategize while minimizing harm to their clients, I interview 35 attorneys working in the Fort Snelling, MN and Omaha, NE immigration courts. Building upon studies of substantive and relational expertise (e.g., Sandefur 2015) as well as resistance lawyering (Farbman 2019), I investigate immigration attorneys’ “temporal expertise,” or their ability to disrupt, delay, and speed up their client’s case. With limited procedural fairness in the immigration court system, defense attorneys use time as both a legal tool and a form of advocacy. This study contributes to research on street-level roles in U.S. immigration courts while expanding the discussion about the role of time in social and legal processes. In the conclusion, I reflect on how time remains a substantive access to justice issue in the U.S. immigration law context, and how this concept can apply to legal systems beyond immigration law and the U.S.