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Data · Immigration courts

Immigration court backlog: dataset, download and API

How many cases are pending in the U.S. immigration courts, how many are decided each month, how many people have a representative on record, and where the pending cases sit by court, state and nationality. Counts only, straight from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Checked October 28, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

The size and movement of the U.S. immigration court backlog, from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). National series from EOIR's workload and adjudication statistics: pending cases, new cases, completions, the share of completed cases with a representative on record, asylum decisions and the share of grants among grants and denials, asylum applications pending and pending cases of unaccompanied children, by fiscal year. Pending proceedings by immigration court, by the respondent's state of address and by nationality, counted from EOIR's monthly FOIA case-data file, with the share that has a representative of record. Counts only: no case row, name or address is published, and every cell under 11 is suppressed. Every national table is re-added against its own totals row; the case-data counts are shown beside the published totals and never spliced into them.

Use it to put the immigration court backlog and its representation rate on the record before you plan marketing, intake or staffing in a state. Look up US for the national series, or a two-letter state code for the pending proceedings of respondents with an address there and the immigration courts located in the state. EOIR says its statistics are subject to change, and the case-data counts are not the published backlog total, so quote the national series for the backlog and the case-data counts for where it sits.

Records
155
Look up by
56
state or US
Primary source
155

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

Where does the data come from?

Phase A: each Workload and Adjudication Statistics PDF is downloaded from justice.gov, its table is read by machine and checked against its own totals (asylum outcomes, filings and representation add to their totals; the same figures agree across PDFs). Phase B: EOIR's FOIA case-data zip is streamed without unpacking; a pending proceeding is a removal, deportation, exclusion, asylum-only or withholding-only proceeding with no judge's decision date, counted by court (base city code), by the respondent's state of address and by nationality, and a representative of record is a court-level, primary, alien-side attorney with a filed Form EOIR-28. Cells under 11 are suppressed.

Period covered
1983 to October 1, 2026
Places
The whole US, states and individual courts
How often we refresh it
Every month
The source's next release
November 2026
Records read
October 28, 2026

Official sources

The sources the records cite most

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What each of the 10 main columns means
jurisdiction
US for national series, or the two-letter code of the state: the respondent's state of address for state records, and the state where the court sits for court records
scope
national, state, court or nationality
measure
What is counted, in plain words
period
The fiscal year (2025), the fiscal year to a quarter end (2026Q3, the fiscal year runs October 1 to September 30) or the date of the case-data file (2026-10-01)
value
The count, or a percent for the representation rate and the grant share (see unit); empty when suppressed (flags.suppressed)
perMonth
The average a month, for new cases and completions
represented
Pending proceedings with a representative of record on the case-data file; empty when a cell is under 11
representedPct
Represented divided by pending, percent, one decimal
shareOfPending
This record's pending proceedings as a percent of all pending proceedings in the case-data file
history
[period, value] pairs for the national series; the published figures by fiscal year

How do I use it in my own tools?

eoir_lookup
For US: EOIR's published pending cases, new cases, completions, representation rate, asylum decisions, grant share, pending asylum applications and pending cases of unaccompanied children, with fiscal-year history. For a two-letter state code: pending proceedings of respondents with an address there and of each immigration court located there, with the share that has a representative of record.
eoir_compare
Pending proceedings and the representation share side by side for up to 10 states (two-letter codes) or US, from EOIR's case data, with each state's share of the national pending count.
eoir_search
Records whose text matches the words given, such as a state, an immigration court city, a nationality, "representation", "asylum" or "unaccompanied".

How to cite this dataset

You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.

Version
1.0.0, released October 28, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23739985 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). Immigration court backlog, representation and asylum outcomes (EOIR workload statistics and case data) (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23739986

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, Immigration court backlog, representation and asylum outcomes (EOIR workload statistics and case data), version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23739986, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Add to a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote)

Not legal advice. These are counts from the Executive Office for Immigration Review's published statistics and case data, kept for marketing planning. EOIR says its statistics are subject to change, a count is not a case outcome, and eligibility, deadlines and strategy are a matter for each person's own lawyer.

What changed recently?

  • 2026-10-28 · First release: 8 records. National series from EOIR's workload statistics (data generated 2026-07-24): pending cases, new cases, completions, representation, asylum decisions and applications, pending cases of unaccompanied children. Pending proceedings by immigration court, state of address and nationality from the EOIR case data of n/a.
  • 2026-10-28 · FOIA zip 2026-10-01: 3,037,977 pending proceedings

The full log is in changes.json.

What are the limits?

  • EOIR says its statistics are subject to change. The newest quarter is marked preliminary.
  • The national totals are the ones EOIR publishes, as of a fiscal-quarter end. The court, state and nationality counts are counted from the monthly case-data file, are not EOIR's published total, and are never added to it.
  • A state record is the state of the respondent's address in EOIR's file, which can be out of date. It is not the state of the court that hears the case.
  • A representative of record means a representative who has filed the court's representation form. A person whose representative has not yet filed it counts as unrepresented, and the published representation rate covers completed cases while the case-data share covers pending ones, so the two are not the same measure.
  • The asylum grant share is computed here as grants divided by grants plus denials. EOIR does not publish it.
  • Small counts are suppressed and never estimated. No case, name or address is published.
  • Records older than 60 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.

Found a wrong value? Report an error with the record id and the source that shows the right value.

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The study built on this data: Immigration court backlog: pending cases, new cases and representation.

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