TRAC immigration judge statistics are free, judge-by-judge reports published by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, showing each immigration judge’s asylum grant and denial rates, total decisions, appointment year, and how their numbers compare with other judges in the same court and nationwide. The data comes from monthly Freedom of Information Act requests to the Executive Office for Immigration Review and is refreshed with each fiscal year’s decisions. If you have a hearing coming up, or you are trying to understand a decision that already came down, TRAC is the closest thing to an X-ray of the judge you drew.
Where the Numbers Come From
TRAC is a data research organization founded in 1989 at Syracuse University that gathers and distributes information about federal enforcement activity.1Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. About Us The immigration figures arrive through monthly FOIA requests to EOIR, the Department of Justice agency that runs the immigration court system.2Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC at Work EOIR itself acknowledges the recurring requests and posts the raw records in its FOIA library.3Executive Office for Immigration Review. FOIA Library
What TRAC adds is translation. EOIR’s databases use coded entries, abbreviations, and internal structures that a non-specialist cannot easily read. TRAC converts those records into filterable reports where you can sort by court, judge, nationality, relief sought, representation status, detention status, and outcome. That is why the site, rather than EOIR itself, is where most attorneys go when they want to see what a specific judge actually does.
What the Judge Profiles Show
The main tool sits on TRAC’s immigration portal and reports asylum decisions broken down by individual judge, including grant rates, denial rates, and total decisions.4Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Judge-by-Judge Asylum Decisions in Immigration Courts You can search by judge name, court, or city. Each profile reflects decisions over a defined period, usually a fiscal year or a multi-year career total, and shows the year the judge was appointed.
Immigration judges are attorneys appointed by the Attorney General to serve as administrative judges within EOIR.5eCFR. 8 CFR 1003.10 – Immigration Judges More than 600 currently sit across 73 immigration courts and three adjudication centers.6United States Department of Justice. Office of the Chief Immigration Judge For each of them, TRAC lets you see career totals alongside recent-year numbers, so a judge who has moved sharply in one direction or the other stands out.
Reading a Judge’s Numbers Without Misreading Them
Grant rates do not exist in a vacuum. A judge with a 5 percent asylum grant rate is not necessarily biased if that court’s docket is heavy on nationalities with weak legal claims. A judge with a high grant rate is not necessarily lenient if the docket is loaded with claimants from countries where persecution is well documented. The single most useful comparison is within the same court, among judges hearing similar case mixes.
The second useful comparison is a judge against their own past. TRAC’s career totals sit next to recent-year figures for a reason. Rates shift when circuit law changes, when a court’s docket composition changes, and when individual judges recalibrate. A judge whose grant rate has fallen sharply in the last fiscal year is a different judge, in practice, from the one their career average describes.
Circuit law is the other factor buried inside the numbers. The federal circuit court of appeals with jurisdiction over an immigration court sets the legal standards judges must apply, and circuits disagree on fundamentals. Some require that a protected characteristic be “one central reason” for the persecution; others require only that it be “one reason.” Identical facts can win in one circuit and lose in another, and those differences show up in TRAC’s court-level rates before they show up anywhere else.
Regional and Within-Court Disparities
Geographic disparity is the most striking pattern in the data. TRAC’s judge-by-judge asylum reports for fiscal year 2025 show courts granting asylum in roughly a quarter of decided cases sitting alongside courts that granted it in none.4Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Judge-by-Judge Asylum Decisions in Immigration Courts Houston granted asylum in none of its tracked decisions during that period; Chicago granted it in about a quarter. Charlotte’s rate ran under 1 percent, while Seattle’s exceeded 14 percent.
Within a single court, the spread can be wider still. TRAC has documented ranges of more than 90 percentage points between the highest and lowest asylum grant rates among judges sitting in the same city.7TRAC Reports. Immigration Court Asylum Grant Rates Cut in Half San Francisco and New York City have historically shown the widest spreads, with one judge granting over 90 percent of cases and a colleague in the same building granting fewer than 5 percent. The luck of the assignment matters, and TRAC is where you find out how much.
Other Metrics Worth Pulling
In Absentia Removal Rates
TRAC tracks how often each judge and each court orders removal in absentia, meaning the respondent did not appear for the hearing. Under federal law, a judge must order removal in absentia if the government proves proper written notice was given and the respondent is removable, and the person then has only 180 days to file a motion to reopen based on “exceptional circumstances” such as a serious medical emergency; after that, the only path is proving notice was never actually received.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 8 USC 1229a – Removal Proceedings A person who misses a hearing after oral notice of the consequences also faces a ten-year statutory bar on certain discretionary relief.
A strikingly high in absentia rate at a particular court is usually a signal of systemic notice or scheduling problems rather than mass noncompliance, and TRAC’s numbers are how you spot that pattern before you assume the worst about your own situation.
Representation, Nationality, and Detention
TRAC’s filters break outcomes down by whether the respondent had an attorney, the respondent’s nationality, and whether they were detained or released. Representation is the single most consequential filter: represented respondents fare significantly better across almost every court. The tools also separate types of relief, including asylum, cancellation of removal, and voluntary departure, so a judge’s overall grant rate can be pulled apart by what was actually being asked for.
Backlog and Wait Times by Court
At the end of February 2026, TRAC reported 3,318,099 active cases pending before the immigration courts.9Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC Immigration Quick Facts The backlog tracker lets you filter pending cases by court, nationality, and representation status, which shows where bottlenecks are concentrated. Some big-city courts carry tens of thousands of pending cases each; smaller courts run backlogs in the low hundreds. Detained cases move faster because detention forces resolution; non-detained cases, the bulk of the backlog, often stretch over years.
One caution when reading duration numbers: EOIR’s Dedicated Docket program, originally launched in 2021 for families apprehended at the southwest border, was expanded nationwide in August 2025 to cover all non-detained immigration courts, with judges aiming to decide those cases within 180 days of the first master calendar hearing.10United States Department of Justice. DHS and DOJ Announce Dedicated Docket Process for More Efficient Immigration Hearings Those expedited cases show up as shorter durations and can pull down overall averages if you are not filtering carefully.
Putting It to Use Before a Hearing
For an attorney, the practical value of TRAC’s data is calibration. You learn the assigned judge’s historical grant rate on the specific type of relief you are seeking, how that number compares with the rest of the court, and whether it has moved recently. You adjust strategy accordingly: what to emphasize, what corroboration is worth chasing, which arguments the judge has accepted before, and where a colleague on the same bench treats the same facts differently.
For a respondent without a lawyer, TRAC at least sets expectations. A 3 percent grant rate does not mean a strong case will lose, but it tells you the judge is applying a demanding standard and that the presentation needs to be airtight. It also tells you whether a request for a change of venue, if one is legally available, would land you in front of a court where similar cases move differently.
All of the tools are free and sit on TRAC’s immigration portal, including the backlog tracker, the asylum backlog search, the new-proceedings tracker, and the judge-by-judge asylum reports.11Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC Immigration Across hundreds of thousands of decisions, the numbers show patterns that no single day in court could reveal. They do not decide any one case. They tell you, before you walk in, what the room has done before.