From the Border to the Bench: Immigration Surges and Asylum Adjudication in Chicago and Seattle (2016–2024)

This paper examines changes in asylum adjudication in the Chicago Immigration Court after the launch of Texas Governor Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star (OLS) program, as well as the role of immigration judge ideology in shaping asylum grant behavior. OLS contributed to the arrival of thousands of bused migrants to Chicago after 2022. As immigration became more locally visible and politically salient, Chicago's immigration court offered a useful setting for examining whether adjudication shifted during a period of heightened immigration pressure. This study asks whether Chicago judges changed their asylum grant behavior after the migrant influx, and whether Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges differed in their grant patterns. To answer these questions, this study uses FOIA-derived immigration court data compiled by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse to construct a judge-year panel of asylum merits decisions from 2016 through 2024. It then estimates four variations of a difference-in-differences (DID) empirical design comparing Chicago to Seattle before and after 2022. The findings suggest that asylum grant rates in Chicago increased relative to Seattle after the onset of Governor Abbott's OLS program. The results also show that Republican-appointed judges are less likely to grant asylum on average than Democratic-appointed judges. Yet, the findings do not provide evidence that ideology significantly altered the size of Chicago's post-2022 shift itself. Overall, the results of this study suggest that both local context and adjudicator background matter for asylum outcomes.