Immigration Court Rankings

How PlainImmigration Rankings Are Compiled

Our rankings are computed directly from the upstream DOJ EOIR FOIA dataset, not editorially curated and not influenced by advertisers. Each ranking surfaces a clear, reproducible metric (for example, share of granted cases per court, average wait time in months, count of cases decided per judge), and the underlying numbers are visible on the associated court and judge pages so you can verify them. We recompute rankings whenever the upstream data refreshes, and we publish the refresh cadence on the methodology page.

What Rankings Mean (and What They Do Not)

A ranking is a useful lens, it tells you where to start looking, but it is not a judgment about a judge's competence or a court's fairness. Being at the top of a grant-rate ranking does not mean a court is "better," and being at the bottom does not mean a court is "worse." Outcomes reflect the mix of case types, nationalities, legal representation rates, and individual judicial philosophies a given court handles. Wherever a ranking could be misread as a quality claim, we include an explanatory note on the page. When a ranking is rate-based (grants per total decisions, months to first hearing), we describe the denominator so you can sanity-check whether the normalization fits your question.

Why We Publish These Rankings

Rankings make large public datasets navigable. Most visitors arrive with a question ("Which immigration court has the longest backlog?" or "Where do grant rates concentrate?") and benefit from seeing a ranked list with direct links to the full court and judge records. Publishing ranked views of public data is a long-established practice in civic journalism; we are careful to surface the raw numbers, link to the official EOIR source, and avoid editorial spin. If a ranking ever implies a value judgment not supported by the data, please email us at the address on the contact page and we will review the wording.

Methodology, Sources, and Corrections

Every ranking is derived from the source dataset linked on the methodology page. We do not blend proprietary signals; we do not substitute editor opinion for data. If you believe a ranking is miscomputed or that a record is misclassified, please contact us with the specific record ID and the expected correction, and we will investigate within the next refresh cycle. Corrections that affect the published ranking are rolled forward immediately; minor formatting fixes go out with the next scheduled refresh.

Underlying Source

Raw case-level data comes from the US Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), released periodically via FOIA. Each row in our database corresponds to a single decision; aggregations (grant rate, denial rate, average wait) are computed on the full set of decisions for the cohort you are viewing. See the methodology page for the exact computation and exclusions.