In January 2022, an immigration lawyer named Chloe Dillon led a seminar titled “Defending Illegal Entry and Reentry Cases from A to NG.” Less than a year later, she was appointed a federal immigration judge in San Francisco. Since her appointment, she has denied just 1.2% of the asylum claims brought before her, while the average denial rate during that period was 60.6% nationwide.

Even in the San Francisco court, where denial rates were half the national average, Dillion’s 1.2% is still remarkable — unless you compare it to her San Francisco court colleague, Shira M. Levine, who denied only 2.2% of cases, according to data collected by Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration Program, which tracked judge-level asylum decisions from fiscal years 2018-23.

The type of asylum cases a particular court might hear can partially account for the denial-rate disparity. In New York, for example, where the rate is around 35%, the top five countries of origin in the current immigration backlog are China, Ecuador, India, Russia, and Georgia, two of which are totalitarian enemies of the U.S. In Dallas, where the rate is over 70%, the top five countries of origin in the backlog are Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, and Mexico, all of which are places from which many economic migrants come. A more cynical observer might also suspect that lawyers applying to be immigration judges in New York might be a tad more liberal than lawyers applying to be immigration judges in Dallas. (These judges are technically appointed by the U.S. attorney general, but this seems to be a legal formality, given that there is an application page.)