EOIR

EOIR Database adventures, part I: encoding

As part of the Asylum Lab project at NYU, I’ve started poking around the database of the Executive office of immigration review (EOIR) published by the department of justice every month. It’s a monster of a database; millions of rows detailing each person, charge, and motion in the enormous parallel federal court system that has been set up to track applicants for asylum, proposed deportees, and so on. This is not exactly a database; instead, it’s a bunch of table dumps without a clear schema.