One of the country's most prominent data centers for collecting and analyzing immigration statistics will no longer track the number of minors with cases before the Executive Office for Immigration Review, saying the agency's data has too many deficiencies.

EOIR's monitoring of kids caught up in immigration court proceedings has always been imperfect, Susan B. Long, co-founder and co-director of Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse told Law360 in an interview Friday. However, its data quality appears to have reached a new low in the past year, even as federal authorities have struggled to get their arms around a sustained increase in the number of children arriving at the southern border.

"It's just totally awful," Long said of EOIR's juvenile table, the agency's single source for reporting numbers of children under 18 years old. "There's no way to get a figure out of this."

Much of the problem with EOIR's current reporting can be traced to changes the agency implemented in 2017, according to a statement TRAC issued Thursday explaining its decision to remove juvenile data from 2018 onwards from its civil immigration reports.

"The results compiled before these changes occurred will be retained online for use in historical research. However, until EOIR corrects their currently flawed data tracking of juveniles, TRAC will be unable to reinstate updating EOIR's handling of juveniles, whether unaccompanied or accompanied as part of a family group," the research center said.

Prior to 2017, EOIR's juvenile data collection focused on children who arrived in the U.S. without a legal guardian. The changes in EOIR's reporting around that time included a new, more restricted definition of unaccompanied minors, expanding its data collection to include accompanied children and another designation of "not applicable," according to Long.

EOIR did not respond to a request from Law360 on Friday for clarity about the "not applicable" code or for comment on TRAC's announcement.

In a footnote to its Thursday announcement, TRAC explained that almost 80% of individuals added to EOIR's juvenile table in fiscal year 2021 were tagged with the "not applicable" designation, and a full 40% of those with a birthdate recorded in the table were over 18 when their cases began, according to TRAC's analysis.

"Basically the increase has just gotten to the point that it was unbelievable," Long told Law360, citing the "skyrocketing" number of not applicable tags in EOIR's juvenile table. "Why are adults going into the juvenile table?"

Keeping up with shifting data sets on the scale of the current U.S. immigration court backlog — which currently includes almost 1.5 million cases, according to TRAC — requires a large number of man-hours, which would have posed a challenge for EOIR amid a resource squeeze in recent years, Long acknowledged. However, she said that did not excuse the agency for "burying its head in the sand."

TRAC issued two letters, in September and October, to EOIR expressing its concerns before publicly denouncing the agency's juvenile data this week. According to Long, the center is still waiting for a response.

TRAC previously raised concerns about EOIR data in 2019 regarding cases that seemed to disappear from the agency's records without explanation each month. In response, the center received a letter from then-EOIR Director James McHenry said the agency "does not delete data" without explaining the mechanisms that led cases to be dropped from its reports. McHenry went on to attack the center's "inflammatory and inaccurate accusations" and question its motivations for flagging the inconsistent data.

Problems with EOIR's juvenile data were particularly troubling given the vulnerable population they cover, Long told Law360.

A lack of reliable data on juvenile immigration cases not only hinders media and advocacy groups that track those numbers, but stands in the way of agency improvement as well, according to Jennifer Podkul, vice president for policy and advocacy at Kids In Need of Defense.

"Unreliable data on case outcomes for unaccompanied children has been a long-standing problem. It hinders the government's ability to identify best practices and efficiencies in dealing with children's cases," Podkul said in a statement to Law360. "With clearer data, policy reform that would streamline procedures and increase due process for children would be more likely."

Long echoed that position, telling Law360, "You can't manage what you can't measure."

"It appears that only with public concern and the oversight agencies getting involved [can we hope for a response], or it's just not going to change," she said.

--Editing by Rich Mills.