New York’s Most Lenient Immigration Judge Is Gone — and the Numbers Tell You Why

The Department of Justice has quietly removed one of New York’s most prolific asylum granters from the bench, and the statistics attached to her record read less like a judicial history than a policy statement. Judge Vivienne Gordon-Uruakpa, who served at the downtown Manhattan immigration courthouse, approved asylum claims at a rate of 97 percent — higher than any other immigration judge in the state of New York and far above both the national and local averages. She was terminated in September, though the news only surfaced publicly this week when reporters noticed her name had vanished from the courthouse’s official website.

The DOJ, asked about the absence, offered three words of confirmation and nothing else: the website, a spokesperson said, is “up to date.” The terse response was all the official comment the public received regarding the end of a judicial career defined by one of the most extraordinary approval records in American immigration court history.

The numbers from TRAC Immigration, a nonpartisan data research center at Syracuse University, fill in the picture. From fiscal year 2019 through 2024, Gordon-Uruakpa decided 924 asylum claims on their merits. She granted asylum in 806 of those cases, extended other forms of relief in 30 more, and denied relief to just 88 individuals. Her denial rate worked out to 9.5 percent — compared to a national denial rate of 57.7 percent among immigration judges across the country during the same period. Even among her colleagues at the New York Immigration Court, the denial rate was 34.8 percent — nearly four times higher than hers.

To put it plainly: if you walked into Judge Gordon-Uruakpa’s courtroom seeking asylum, you had roughly a 9-in-10 chance of walking out with relief granted. If you walked into any other immigration courtroom in America, the odds were closer to a coin flip.

The largest nationality group appearing before Gordon-Uruakpa was Chinese nationals, who made up 40.5 percent of her caseload. The next largest groups were from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and El Salvador. For context, the national caseload during the same period was dominated by Central American countries — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — reflecting the broader character of border crossings. The composition of Gordon-Uruakpa’s docket, dominated by Asian nationals who frequently come through airports and legal ports of entry, is one contextual factor TRAC researchers note can affect outcomes. But even accounting for that, a 90-plus percent grant rate stands out.

Gordon-Uruakpa, 66, attended Fordham University in the Bronx and Howard University School of Law. Her professional background is in legal aid and criminal defense — fields that, by their nature, orient a practitioner toward advocacy for the individual facing the system rather than enforcement of the system’s limits. That background is not a disqualifier; many accomplished judges come from criminal defense. But it does inform how observers interpret a record this one-sided.

What makes Gordon-Uruakpa’s case significant beyond her individual record is what it represents structurally. Immigration judges are not tenured jurists in the traditional sense. They are lawyers who serve at the pleasure of the Attorney General, who holds the authority to hire and fire them. That arrangement has existed for decades, largely without controversy, because immigration enforcement priorities rarely changed fast enough to make judicial philosophy a front-page issue. Under the current administration, that has changed. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired during President Trump’s second term, and the DOJ has posted job listings recruiting replacements.

The administration’s direction on immigration adjudication is not subtle. In the last quarter of 2025, roughly 80 percent of asylum claimants appearing before immigration courts were deported — a dramatic reversal from the open-ended grant rates that characterized much of the prior era. And in what amounts to a pointed symbolic gesture, John Burns, regarded as the toughest immigration judge in New York on asylum claims, was named Acting Assistant Chief Judge at the start of 2026. Where Gordon-Uruakpa’s courtroom functioned as a near-guaranteed path to relief, Burns represents the other end of the spectrum.

Critics of the firings have raised due process concerns and characterized the removals as political interference in judicial independence. That critique would carry more weight if immigration judges held the same constitutional protections as Article III federal judges. They don’t. The structure of immigration courts has always placed these adjudicators inside the executive branch, which means their philosophical alignment with administration policy has always been, at minimum, a legitimate consideration for the officeholder in charge. Whether that structure is ideal is a separate policy debate. But calling the firings a violation of judicial independence misreads how immigration courts actually work.

The harder question — and an honest one — is whether a 97 percent grant rate reflects genuine legal merit in the cases heard, sound judicial philosophy applied consistently, or something more like an ideological predisposition that shaped outcomes before the evidence was fully weighed. The TRAC data does note that Gordon-Uruakpa’s docket had a lower-than-average share of unrepresented asylum seekers, and that representation significantly improves outcomes nationwide. Only 2.9 percent of asylum seekers appearing before her were unrepresented, compared to 16.4 percent nationally. That is a real variable. It does not, however, fully explain a denial rate one-sixth the national average.

What the Gordon-Uruakpa case illustrates, above all, is that immigration courts have functioned for years as a system where outcomes depended heavily — sometimes decisively — on which judge a claimant happened to draw. Scholars have called it a “judicial lottery,” and the data consistently backs that characterization.