Yesterday, June 15, we finally received a letter from EOIR Director James McHenry in response. But instead of addressing the obvious serious data management problems at his agency, Director McHenry denied there were any problems and attacked TRAC's motives for spreading what he claims are falsehoods about the agency.

TRAC had written Director McHenry back in October 2019 when 1,507 applications for relief, many on which immigration judges had already granted asylum, disappeared from the data EOIR furnished TRAC and the agency posted on its website. We wrote him again the following month when the number of missing relief applications more than doubled to 3,799. Both letters were met with silence.

Alarmingly, the data from EOIR for April 2020 on the Immigration Courts was missing an even larger number of records. In addition, month after month computer processing mistakes led to other gross irregularities. TRAC wrote a third letter to EOIR Director McHenry expressing our concern and seeking a commitment from him to take the steps needed to address these problems.

This Monday, June 15, we finally received Director McHenry's response to our three letters (available here). Rather than addressing the real issues concerning the agency's continuing data management deficiencies, Director McHenry attacked our motives for alleging that the agency had any problems and further claimed that TRAC knew our statements to be untrue but had made them anyway.

TRAC is saddened that the Director appears unconcerned with ensuring that the agency's own records are accurate, or that the public is provided with correct and reliable data about the Immigration Court's operations.

To read the full report discussing the problems TRAC has uncovered in EOIR data, and Director McHenry's response go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/614/

If you want to be sure to receive a notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1

Follow us on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/tracreports

or like us on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to:

https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl