National ranking · FY2015–2025
The Immigration Judge Lottery
Asylum grant rates swing from about 97.2% for the most permissive judges down to 0.0% for the strictest, on the same law. The national average is 48.3%.
Data updated 2026-09-05
- 97.2%
- Highest judge rate
- 0.0%
- Lowest judge rate
- 48.3%
- National average
Judge names below are the anonymized judge codes DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) assigns in its public case-data release, not verified public identities. EOIR does not publish immigration judges' full names in this dataset. Grant rates here are asylum (I-589) merits decisions for FY2015–2025 across the 77 immigration courts in our extract; EOIR's wider FOIA archive goes back to 2001 and is not this ranking's population. See our methodology for detail.
Download the EOIR asylum statistics dataset (CSV) , open extract wired into this page's Dataset JSON-LD.
The verdict
Outcomes in immigration court depend heavily on which judge hears the case: asylum grant rates range from roughly 97.2% to 0.0% among judges with at least 25 merits decisions. On the highest-grant board, the #25 cutoff to make this list is 90.0% (Judge DDK); on the lowest-grant board it is 3.8% (Judge NBW).
- 97.2%
- #1 highest grant · Judge JB
- 90.0%
- #25, highest-list cutoff
- 0.0%
- #1 lowest grant · Judge JBS
- 3.8%
- #25, lowest-list cutoff
Grant rates also reflect each judge's case mix, the nationalities they hear, and representation rates, not adjudicator philosophy alone. These are descriptive statistics, not predictions for any individual case, and not legal advice: consult a licensed immigration attorney or accredited representative for guidance on your situation.
Highest asylum grant rates
Lowest asylum grant rates
How the asylum grant rate is computed →
Every figure on PlainImmigration is rendered directly from federal immigration court records, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on DOJ EOIR immigration court case data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of 2026-09-05.