Immigration Court Map is Now Updated for 2022

Geographers don’t necessarily make maps, but we don’t not make maps, either. A few years ago, I made a map of the US immigration court locations for my dissertation and shared it out online through ImmProf Blog here.

I initially made this map for myself as a reference. But after realizing that no map existed, I suspected others might find it helpful, too. (Always share your work, friends.)

Apparently some people found it useful, because a short while later, I was asked to update the map with the circuit courts, as well. This makes a lot of sense, because as you may not know, each circuit has its own precedence for immigration laws that comes into effect if someone appeals their case up to the BIA (outside of D.C.) and then back to the federal circuit court in which the original case took place.

Then last week one of my heroes, Lindsey Harris, law professor at the University of D.C., mentioned that she used this map in her classes and wanted to know if I had an updated version.

I didn’t at the time, but I had a test version back to her relatively quickly after reviewing the EOIR’s current list of courts here.

A few notes about this map that I can help but mention. First, these courts are only the courts listed on EOIR’s website. This list may not be complete or up-to-date. I have not ground-proofed all of these sites, but I consider it sufficiently accurate to be useful for now. Second, the locations are all manual, not geolocated, so they may be slightly off. Third, this map does not capture every single “hearing location”, or place where a hearing can take place, which includes detention centers, federal or state prisons, local jails, dedicated videoconferencing rooms inside of federal buildings, and, these days, attorneys’ and clients’ homes and offices.

It has taken me considerable time and research to realize just how messy the geography of the immigration court system is and while I hope that this map is useful, I want to emphasize that it is a simplification, not objective reality.

This map is also really ugly with the color scheme of a box of Mike & Ike’s, for some reason. Sorry about that. I do hope to create a better designed map when I get some time.

With all of those caveats in mind, I hope you find this useful. Feel free to use however you wish (with credit) and please let me know if there are any outstanding errors that I can correct in a future version.

Note: I edited this post to remove the previous link to a tweet with a map with errors in it. Although I had made it clear in the text that the map on Twitter contained errors, I felt like I was creating confusing by linking to two maps in the same post. Hopefully this avoids confusion.

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