Relief Docket is an interactive public dashboard about the United States immigration court system.
It is built to answer plain-language questions like:
- Which immigration courts have the largest caseloads?
- How different are asylum grant rates from one judge to another?
- Which nationalities appear most often in immigration court data?
- How often are cases decided when someone is not present in court?
- How do policy changes show up in court outcomes over time?
The goal is not to tell anyone what should happen in a particular case. The goal is to make a very large public dataset easier to understand.
The main source is the EOIR CASE database, published by the Executive Office for Immigration Review through its public FOIA library.
EOIR is the part of the U.S. Department of Justice that runs immigration courts. Its CASE database contains millions of records about immigration court cases, proceedings, applications, hearing locations, judges, decisions, and related lookup tables.
This repository currently includes small, pre-built data files in data/ so the app can load quickly without downloading the full EOIR release. Those files were generated from a local June 2026 EOIR release.
Current real-data status:
- Last EOIR release loaded:
2026-06 - Cases:
12,552,603 - Proceedings:
16,376,512 - Applications:
15,921,544 - Seed mode:
false
That means the core dashboard is now using real EOIR pipeline output, not sample data.
These sections currently use real EOIR-derived data:
- Judges
- Courts
- Nationalities and countries of origin
- Case outcomes
- Attorney representation gap
- Policy trend metrics
- In absentia orders
- In absentia rates by court
- A current backlog snapshot
Some other sections are present in the app but do not yet have real data behind them. Those files are intentionally empty rather than filled with fake numbers.
Not yet fully built from real data:
- BIA appeals
- Federal circuit appeals
- Bond analytics
- ICE detention trends
- Removal pathway breakdowns
- Unaccompanied children trends
- Historical case age and backlog age distributions
In other words: the core immigration court analytics are real. A few secondary topic areas still need additional pipeline work before they should be treated as real findings.
Public immigration court data is powerful, but it is not clean in the way people expect a spreadsheet to be clean.
Known issues include:
- EOIR changes table formats over time.
- Some records can disappear from later monthly releases.
- Codes can change meaning across years.
- Some case types are not included in the same way as others.
- A raw grant rate does not always control for case type, nationality, attorney representation, detention status, or local docket practices.
Relief Docket keeps a canonical database that is designed not to delete old records when EOIR omits them from a later release. The app also includes a Data Quality page so readers can see what the data can and cannot support.
For setup instructions, rebuild commands, repository layout, and pipeline notes, see Technical Notes.
This project can show patterns. It cannot explain every cause behind those patterns.
For example, two judges may have different grant rates because of differences in case mix, nationality mix, attorney representation, detained versus non-detained dockets, time period, or many other factors. A number on this site should be treated as a starting point for investigation, not as a final judgment about a person, court, or case.
The current build is ready to run with real EOIR-derived core data. The next major work is to replace the remaining empty secondary sections with real pipeline outputs.