Administrative Volatility and Immigration Enforcement: The Structural Sources of Instability in a Static Statute

Throughout decades of political change, the United States has governed immigration through a largely unchanged statute, and utilized executive orders and memoranda as a way to reshape enforcement. Although the Immigration and Nationality Act sets the grounds for admission and removal, it leaves the system's daily operation to each new administration. This creates enforcement volatility, being defined as sudden and repeated shifts in policy and outcomes without any change in law. While existing research explains why enforcement is easy to reverse, it seldom traces how those reversals affect fairness in adjudication, a gap this paper addresses. Firstly, this explanatory sequential mixed methods study tracks four indicators from immigration courts, those being pending caseload and asylum grant rates, along with the pace of completions and variation across judges. Additionally, it utilizes a confidential key informant interview with an experienced immigration attorney, explaining how movement reaches individual cases. Every indicator moved while the statute remained unchanged, as asylum grant rates fell from 52.6% to 19.2% within two years. The interview identified four ways this movement affects cases. Through research, it is evident that this instability is built into the system's legal and institutional design. The Act delegates broad authority to the Executive with limited judicial review, while immigration courts remain within the Department of Justice. This helps us understand that fairness depends on whether individuals can predict the rules governing their cases. Because of this, the paper proposes four reforms making policy harder to reverse while preserving executive discretion.