Barnard students and faculty take part in novel national study of American immigration courtrooms - Incite at Columbia University

Barnard will play a central role this year in a national research initiative focused on understanding the inner workings of immigration courtrooms. The project, titled “Hidden Justice: An Ethnographic Examination of U.S. Immigration Courts,” will be supported by both student-led research conducted during a spring 2026 course offered at Barnard and a $75,000 grant from the Incite Institute at Columbia.

Nara Milanich, chair of Barnard’s history department, will lead the project in collaboration with Amelia Frank-Vitale, assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and Lauren Heidbrink, assistant professor of human development at California State University, Long Beach. Together, the scholars will oversee parallel cohorts of student researchers at Barnard, Princeton, and CSULB, creating a multi-institutional research model that merges pedagogy and ethnography to tap into the “black box” nature of immigration courts—a system where similar cases can produce starkly different outcomes for those seeking U.S. residence.

The study aims to explain those disparities through sustained courtroom observation, documenting how judges, attorneys, and interpreters interact in ways that rarely appear in official records. Rather than solely focusing on case outcomes, the project analyzes patterns that emerge through hours of court-watching done by students.

At Barnard, student researchers will compile the data through the class Power, Politics, and Procedure in U.S. Immigration Court, taught by Jennifer Trowbridge, term assistant professor of human rights. In the course, students are trained as ethnographic observers, working inside immigration courtrooms while grounding their observations in historical and legal context.

But the classroom component builds on years of collaboration among the project’s co-founders.

Frank-Vitale and Heidbrink are scholars of Central American migration who have served as expert witnesses in asylum cases and first began discussing three years ago how social science research could be made more usable within immigration courts. When the pair later connected with Milanich, she was similarly focused on strengthening ties between research and public-facing work.

“There are lots of ways that classrooms and communities—classrooms and the outside world—can nourish each other,” Milanich said.

In 2022, the three developed an expert paper series through the Center for Mexico and Central America, which Milanich directed at the time. The series translated academic research into accessible country-condition analyses that attorneys could directly cite in court.

“Attorneys were reaching out to me a lot to give context to what the person they were representing had lived,” Frank-Vitale told Spectator. “The research credentials means that, in asylum hearings, people like myself can really help educate the court and the judge on the conditions in a person’s home country.”

As the expert paper series gained traction, the scholars began asking how the model could extend to training students.

“Then, it evolved to ‘How do we engage students?’” Heidbrink said. “How do we bring court watching as pedagogy into the classroom?”

Frank-Vitale aimed to answer this question as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, first piloting a course centered around asylum work where students partnered with legal service organizations representing asylum seekers. She later taught a polished version of the course, Seeking Sanctuary in New York City, at Barnard in fall 2023 as an assistant professor. The class is still offered through Barnard’s human rights department.

While at Barnard, Frank-Vitale also developed a second course focused more explicitly on court-watching, with students spending four hours a week observing immigrant court proceedings. Through a partnership with New York Law School, students contributed their observations to an ongoing courtwatching study.

“That experience, that class, the students got a lot out of it,” Frank-Vitale said. “It felt very productive and unfinished in all the best ways. It really felt like there was a lot left to be done there.”

As the scholars reflected on the potential of court-watching as both pedagogy and research, they began discussing how to build on the model of Frank-Vitale’s past courses and expand the effort across institutions.

“It was through that that we started looking for some seed funding to try to formalize the training and scale up,” Heidbrink said. “That’s where the Incite support has been instrumental.”

The Incite Institute awarded a five-figure grant in fall 2025 to support the Hidden Justice project. The institute, which uses the University as a convening space to address pressing social challenges, runs several grant programs, including the Hard Questions grant—an initiative designed to fund research that approaches complex issues in novel ways.

Evan McCormick, director of research at the Incite Institute, told Spectator that the Hidden Justice project aligned closely with the goals of the Hard Questions program.

“It’s hard to imagine a more vexing social challenge right now than this question of immigration, and particularly how it is handled by the legal system,” McCormick said.

Beyond its subject matter, McCormick said, the project stands out for its approach to researching the immigration system. Diverging from a more common legal analysis, Hidden Justice pairs detailed, ethnographic observation of judges, attorneys, interpreters, and respondents with active student involvement, documenting the subtle interactions and practices that shape courtroom proceedings.

“What is really exciting is that you imagine that in that training, in that observation, in that contact with the courts, there is also a transformation that happens among a network of students,” McCormick said.

With funding secured and a research model in place, the initiative began to scale across institutions. Under the leadership of Milanich, Frank-Vitale, and Heidbrink, dozens of students at Barnard, Princeton, and CSULB are being trained at their respective campuses as ethnographic observers and sent into courtrooms in New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, and Santa Ana.

Even as the project scales nationwide, the work still begins at the individual institutions, the leading professors told Spectator.

As Trowbridge enters the semester, her teaching philosophy will emphasize experiential learning and the responsibilities that accompany it.

“It’s really important that students have context for who they’re going to be either speaking with or observing,” Trowbridge said.

According to Trowbridge, the course prepares students to approach the courtroom with both awareness and critical perspective, linking their personal perspectives to the complex realities they witness.

For some, that preparation allows classroom learning and personal experience to intersect in powerful ways. Ariana Banez, BC ’27, who has called the Mexican-American border home for most of her life, is currently enrolled in Trowbridge’s class.

“While my understanding of immigration has long been shaped by lived experience, I have recently become eager to engage with it as an academic field of study,” Banez said. “The course has encouraged us to sit with our experiences, critically analyze them through academic frameworks, and consider tangible ways to show up for one another and for the communities we hope to serve.”

Looking ahead, the project’s classroom leadership will rotate as the initiative continues to evolve. Rebecca Kobrin, associate professor of American Jewish history at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, will take over for Trowbridge in fall 2026, bringing with her a background in service-learning teaching.

Kobrin has previously taught Immigrant New York, a course that integrates academic study with volunteer work at the Riverside Language Program, an organization committed to teaching English as a second language to refugees. She told Spectator that she sees learning as something that does not occur in isolation from the world it studies.

“Part of the main point of the course, which is service learning, is that learning does not only take place by reading books and writing papers, but also by doing actions,” Kobrin said.

Kobrin’s approach mirrors the broader ambitions of Hidden Justice, which the project leaders hope to grow beyond its current institutional footprint. According to Heidbrink, faculty members at other universities across the country have already expressed a curiosity about the project.

By coordinating student researchers across three institutions, the Hidden Justice project represents a rare attempt to systematically observe immigration courts at a national scale and shed light on a legal system that operates out of public view, its organizers said.

“While academic research may feel passive and slow, it is critical,” Milanich said. “In order to change something, you have to know how it functions in the first place.”

Staff Writer Ashley Flores can be contacted at ashley.flores@columbiaspectator.com.