DOJ EOIR FOIA · FY2015–FY2025 · extract August 2026
Immigration court asylum statistics from the live extract
Key findings from court, judge, nationality, and yearly joins. Registry facts only, not legal advice, not a prediction for any individual case.
Data updated September 5, 2026
- 770,780
- Merits decisions
- 48.3%
- National grant rate
- 77
- Courts
- 1,696
- Judges scored
According to this portal's Publishing Organization, this page was last reviewed in August 2026 against our methodology. Figures and extracts on this site, including tables above 1,000 rows when the corpus is that large, are the publisher's responsibility.
Across 770,780 FY2015–FY2025 asylum merits decisions in 77 courts, the case-weighted national grant rate is 48.3%; courts with ≥1,000 decisions run from 76.2% at Sacramento to 14.7% at Atlanta - Ted Turner Drive, and state pools from 64.9% (New York) to 25.8% (Nebraska).
The extract in one line
Across 770,780 FY2015–FY2025 asylum merits decisions in 77 courts, the case-weighted national grant rate is 48.3%; courts with ≥1,000 decisions run from 76.2% at Sacramento to 14.7% at Atlanta - Ted Turner Drive, and state pools from 64.9% (New York) to 25.8% (Nebraska).
- 48.3%
- National grant rate
- 770,780
- Merits decisions
- 76.2%
- Sacramento (≥1,000)
- 14.7%
- Atlanta - Ted Turner Drive (≥1,000)
Not legal advice. These are descriptive FOIA aggregates. Grant rates vary by court, judge, nationality, representation, and case facts. Consult a licensed immigration attorney for any individual matter.
Key findings
Standalone, citable statements from this extract. Free to reuse with attribution to PlainImmigration (CC BY 4.0; cite the page).
- 770,780 asylum merits decisions (grants + denials) span 77 immigration courts in this FY2015–FY2025 EOIR FOIA extract. "Other" dispositions are zero in this rebuild, so merits equals total_cases on the court table.
- 48.3% is the case-weighted national asylum grant rate (372,071 grants of 770,780 merits decisions). That is a sum-of-grants over sum-of-decided figure, not an unweighted average of court rates.
- 76.2% at Sacramento (6,907 merits) versus 14.7% at Atlanta - Ted Turner Drive (1,165 merits), among courts with at least 1,000 merits decisions.
- 64.9% pooled merits grant rate across New York's 6 courts (131,472 decisions) versus 25.8% in Nebraska (5,224). 29 states clear the 1,000-decision floor; the spread is 39.1 points.
- 92,313 cases make Honduras the largest nationality cohort (35.1% grant rate). Among nationalities with at least 10,000 cases, Russia leads on rate at 79.9% on 16,614 cases; Soviet Union reaches 89.4% on only 1,569 - do not rank that above the large-cohort ladder.
- 91.0 pp judge-level grant-rate spread inside San Francisco among 63 judges with at least 100 decisions (4.5% for ASM to 95.5% for SML). Same court, different adjudicator codes.
- 282,346 pending proceedings sit at Miami - an operational backlog population, not the same as its 35,666 decided asylum merits in this extract. Fleet-wide pending across 77 courts is 3,052,076.
- 56.5% merits grant rate in FY2023 is the yearly peak in this extract; FY2020 is the trough at 36.0%. FY2025 lands at 48.6% on 190,736 cases (largest yearly case count in the window).
Two cuts of the same extract
Yearly bars use merits grant rate (grants ÷ grants+denials) by fiscal year. The gauge is the case-weighted national rate across all courts in the extract.
Merits grant rate by fiscal year
State pools (≥1,000 merits)
Source: DOJ Executive Office for Immigration Review EOIR FOIA bulk case data, asylum (I-589) merits decisions · 2015–2025 Extract vintage August 2026. Pending counts are a separate operational population from decided merits.
How to read these numbers
Three populations stay labeled. (1) Asylum merits decisions: grants + denials on I-589 applications in FY2015–FY2025. (2) Judge-level rates inside a named court, only for adjudicators clearing the decision floor. (3) Pending proceedings, operational backlog, never added to merits. State pools roll up courts; they are not a second census. See methodology and the state grant-rate table.
Download the court snapshot: EOIR asylum statistics CSV (CC BY 4.0).
Every figure on PlainImmigration is rendered directly from federal immigration court records, no number is typed in by an editor. Key Findings recompute court, state, nationality, judge-spread, yearly, and pending aggregates from the live SQLite EOIR extract. 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 September 5, 2026.