Immigration judges
915 judges at 73 courts, with 433,849 asylum decisions between them since October 2020. Each profile shows how often the judge denies asylum, against the court and the country, with the judge's official biography and the reporting about them. To find the court for your own state or facility, see which court covers where.
The courts
Which court covers where →The judges
Courts
- Adelanto
- Annandale
- Atlanta Ted Turner Drive
- Atlanta W. Peachtree Street
- Aurora
- Baltimore
- Baton Rouge
- Boston
- Buffalo
- Charlotte
- Chelmsford
- Chicago
- Cleveland
- Concord
- Conroe
- Dallas
- Denver
- Detroit
- El Paso
- El Paso SPC
- Elizabeth
- Eloy
- Florence
- Fort Snelling
- Guaynabo
- Harlingen
- Hartford
- Honolulu
- Houston
- Houston - Greenspoint Park
- Houston South Gessner
- Hyattsville
- Imperial
- Indianapolis
- Kansas City
- Krome
- Laredo
- Las Vegas
- LaSalle
- Los Angeles - West Los Angeles
- Los Angeles-North Los Angeles St.
- Los Angeles-Van Nuys Boulevard
- Memphis
- Miami
- New Orleans
- New York - Varick
- New York/Broadway
- New York/Federal Plaza
- Newark
- Oakdale
- Omaha
- Orlando
- Otay Mesa
- Otero
- Pearsall
- Philadelphia
- Phoenix
- Port Isabel
- Portland
- Sacramento
- Saipan
- Salt Lake City
- San Antonio
- San Diego
- San Francisco
- Santa Ana
- Seattle
- Sterling
- Stewart
- Tacoma
- Tucson
- Ulster
How to read this
The figures come from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which obtains the immigration courts' own case records under the Freedom of Information Act and publishes a judge-by-judge report on asylum decisions. The current edition, published August 27, 2026, covers fiscal years 2021 through the first nine months of 2026 and includes every judge who decided at least 100 asylum cases on the merits at a given court in that period. Judges with fewer decisions, and judges appointed recently, do not appear.
The denial rate is the share of those decisions in which the judge denied asylum and every other form of relief. The leaning label is arithmetic, nothing more: a judge whose rate is at least seven points above the national figure is marked strict, at least seven points below is marked lenient, and everything in between is average. Twenty points either way earns "far".
Rates are shaped by more than a judge's philosophy. Detained dockets deny more than non-detained ones; nationalities differ widely in grant rates; a judge who hears mostly unrepresented respondents will deny more than one who does not. Each profile shows the docket mix where TRAC publishes it, and the comparison with the judge's own court is often more telling than the comparison with the country. A high denial rate is a fact about outcomes, not a verdict on fairness.
Biographies are the official ones published by the Executive Office for Immigration Review at appointment. Coverage sections link to reporting by named outlets and to published court decisions; this site does not collect anonymous reviews of judges.