Sabrina Charles (2024)

Sabrina Charles is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at New York University. Sabrina’s primary research interests are in the sociology of punishment, the administrative state, social theory and the sociology of legal knowledge.

Drawing on four years of ethnographic research in immigration courts across the United States, as well as in-depth interviews with attorneys and immigration judges, Sabrina’s dissertation research investigates when and how state actors intersect the criminal and immigration legal systems during immigration court proceedings. She finds that state actors selectively intersect the two legal systems in ways that increase the immigration court process’s speed and “yield” (the number of people whom immigration judges ultimately order removed from the United States). Sabrina’s National Institute of Social Sciences Dissertation Grant enables her to conduct in-depth interviews with a diverse group of people who have undergone, or are undergoing, immigration court proceedings.

Sabrina received her BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Phi Beta Kappa and with High Honors and Distinction; her JD from Yale Law School; her MPA from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government; and her MPhil in Sociology from New York University.

Sabrina also clerked for the Honorable Barrington D. Parker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Sabrina’s other research explores how state actors use time to shape people’s behaviors and ways of being while attending immigration court hearings and how incarcerated legal experts access and make sense of legal knowledge and expertise.