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TRAC Immigration Judge Reports
Frequently Asked Questions

Published Oct 26, 2022

I know that Judge XYZ is a judge in my city, but I don't see a report on that judge. Why?

To have a report, a judge must have decided at least 100 asylum cases during the period covered by the report.

Some locations do not have a high enough volume of asylum cases.
Sometimes immigration judges are appointed to serve in an administrative capacity so may not decide cases or only decide an occasional case.
A judge who has served only for a short period may not have issued enough decisions to meet the 100 case minimum used.

The 100 case cutoff is used to help ensure that there is a sufficient volume of cases to make for a meaningful report.

Why do some judges have reports in more than one city?

Sometimes judges move from one immigration court to another. On other occasions, a judge may serve in more than one immigration court at the same time. Starting with the 2008 report TRAC has expanded report offerings so that a judge can have a report for each immigration court he or she served on during the period and decided at least 100 asylum cases. (Multiple reports were prepared if the immigration courts were each designated by EOIR as separate "base cities" rather than just separate hearing locations within the same base city.) For prior reports, the report shows up under the "base city" having the largest number of decided asylum cases for that judge.

Why in a judge report will the year-by-year bar chart have a year without any bar?

While TRAC will create a report for any judge with 100 or more decisions for the period covered by the report, denial rates are only calculated for years in which the judge decides 25 or more cases. Therefore the chart may have bars missing for years in which the judge decided fewer than 25 cases.

How do you develop the data used for these reports?

The asylum denial rates are calculated, after further validity checking by TRAC, from the internal files TRAC obtains directly from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). These files record the outcome of each case decided by the Immigration Court. A case is included where an Immigration Judge records a grant or a denial of the asylum application. The bibliographic information was collected from a variety of official sources including press releases, testimony, other biographical information released by the Department of Justice, and responses received to specific TRAC inquiries.

Asylum Is Denied But Other Relief Granted

Starting in 2022, TRAC's judge reports include a new measure to answer a common question: how often does an Immigration Judge who denies the asylum application then grant some other form of relief from removal such as withholding or CAT. To answer this question, each judge report now breaks down asylum grant and denials into three categories, instead of the former two. These three are: