New Report on Disparities in the Immigration Courts

TRAC released a report today on the disparity among Immigration Judges in asylum decisions from FY 1994 through FY 2005. It can be found on TRAC’s website at http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/160/. For this report, TRAC analyzed the electronic records of 297,000 asylum decisions from FY 1994 through FY 2005. The data was obtained and generously provided to TRAC by asylumlaw.org. Among other things, the report found a very large disparity in grant/denial rates among judges. This gap held true even when looking at a subset of the larger asylum population: Chinese applicants in New York EOIR from 2000-2005. The report provides the name, court, denial rate, and ranking of all 208 immigration judges who had at least 100 asylum decisions during the most recent 5-year period. TRAC plans other reports on asylum and a variety of other immigration topics. Larry Katzman is director of TRAC’s Immigration Project. For more information, Larry can be reached at lkatzman@syr.edu. The project was launched last year with the support of the JEHT Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Syracuse University.

KJ