Your asylum case was denied. Or your last attorney stopped returning calls, and you are not sure what was ever filed. Or you have an old removal order and you do not know exactly what happened in that courtroom years ago. In every one of these situations, the answer starts in the same place: the file the immigration court keeps on your case. Until you have it, nobody — not you, and not the next attorney you talk to — can tell you what your options really are.
Getting that file used to be simple: you sent the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) a Freedom of Information Act request and waited. In 2026 it is no longer that simple. EOIR has built online portals for attorneys and for people in proceedings, and it has begun steering — sometimes shoving — record requests away from FOIA and toward those portals. If you know how the routes work, you can still get your file, often faster than before. If you do not, your request can bounce between offices while a filing deadline runs.
This guide explains what is in your immigration court record, the four ways to get it, which way fits your situation, and what to do when the government tells you no.
Why the Court File Is Where Everything Starts
Immigration attorneys do not evaluate cases from memory — the client’s or anyone else’s. Memories compress years of proceedings into a few sentences, and the sentences are often wrong in ways that matter. The court file tells you what was actually filed, what the judge actually ordered, and what deadlines have actually passed. Your court file is the foundation for any relief application — including adjustment of status before the immigration judge.
That matters most in exactly the situations that bring people to a new lawyer. If your application was denied, the written decision states the reasons, and those reasons determine whether an appeal, a motion to reopen, or a new filing is the right response. If a previous attorney handled your case badly, the file is the evidence: what was filed late, what was never filed at all, what arguments were never made. A claim of ineffective assistance of counsel under Matter of Lozada, 19 I&N Dec. 637 (BIA 1988), is built from the record, not from frustration. And if you were ordered removed years ago, the type of order — in absentia, voluntary departure that lapsed, or a contested merits denial — changes the legal strategy completely, including whether returning after deportation is realistic.
One of the most common reasons to pull your records is to find out whether an order was entered while you were not there. If that is your worry, start with our explanation of in absentia removal orders and the motion to reopen that can rescind them. Once the file shows what the judge signed and where the notices went, our guide to rescinding an in absentia order explains which motion lane the record points you into. The file is also what decides whether an approved I-601A is safe to use: a missed hearing in it carries a five-year consular bar the waiver does not cover.
In my practice I have seen the file contradict the client’s understanding of their own case more often than confirm it. Not because clients lie, but because removal proceedings are confusing, interpreters compress, and prior attorneys do not always explain what they did. One recent matter in this office turned on a filing the client did not know existed: a work-permit application returned by USCIS because, somewhere in the client’s history, an earlier application had been filed that neither the client nor we had any record of. The government’s file knew; nobody else did.
What Is in a Record of Proceedings — and What Is Not
The immigration court’s file is called the Record of Proceedings, or ROP. For most cases active since 2022 it exists electronically (an eROP) inside EOIR’s case management system, ECAS. The ROP contains the charging document (the Notice to Appear), every application and motion filed by you or by the government, the exhibits, the immigration judge’s written orders and decisions, and — if your case went to the Board of Immigration Appeals — the appellate filings and decision.
Two things the ROP does not automatically include. First, the hearing audio. Immigration court hearings are recorded digitally (the digital audio recording, or DAR), but a copy of the file does not include the audio unless you specifically ask for it. If what was said at a hearing matters to your case — and in a credibility-based denial it almost always does — request the DAR by name.
Second, the ROP is not your A-file. The A-file is the master immigration record kept by USCIS under the Department of Homeland Security: every application you ever filed, border encounter records, asylum interview notes, the Form I-213 an officer wrote up when you were encountered. The court file and the A-file are held by two different agencies in two different departments of government, and requesting one gets you nothing from the other. A complete evaluation usually needs both. More on the A-file below.
The Four Ways to Get an EOIR Record
Which route to your immigration court record fits you?
1. Request Your Own File Directly From the Court
This is the workhorse, and the route most people have never heard of. Since 2022, a respondent — the person in proceedings — can request their own ROP and hearing audio directly from the immigration court where the last hearing was scheduled, without an attorney, without an online account, and without FOIA. EOIR’s Request a Record of Proceeding page lists the routes: by email to the court, by mail, or in person. Parents and guardians can request a child’s file the same way.
The request rides on Form EOIR-59, a one-page certification and release. It asks for your full name, date and place of birth, and A-number, plus what you want (the whole file, specific documents, the DAR) and how you want it delivered — email works. Sign it under penalty of perjury. That is the entire apparatus. For files that exist electronically, courts can sometimes fulfill a request within days; paper files stored at a federal records center take longer.
The quiet power of this route: nothing stops someone else from preparing the request for you to sign. An attorney you have not yet hired can fill out the EOIR-59, you sign it, and the court sends you your own file — which you may then hand to anyone you please. Keep that in mind; it becomes important two sections from now.
2. Respondent Access: EOIR’s Portal for People Without a Lawyer
In July 2024, EOIR launched Respondent Access, an online portal for unrepresented people with cases before EOIR. After registering, you can view your case information and hearing dates, download your electronic ROP, and file certain documents. Enrollment has been phased, with courts mailing registration notices to unrepresented respondents.
If you are comfortable creating an online account and your case has an electronic file, this is the fastest self-service route — the file downloads as a PDF. Its limits are real, though: it is designed for the unrepresented, registration takes some technical facility and a working email address, and a person in detention or without reliable internet access may find it useless. The portal is a good tool. It is not, as we will see, a substitute for every other route.
3. Through Your Attorney of Record
If you have an attorney who has filed a Form EOIR-28 (immigration court) or EOIR-27 (BIA) in your case, that attorney can download your complete eROP from the ECAS Case Portal, usually within twenty-four hours of requesting it. This is the standard route for represented cases and the reason represented clients rarely think about records at all.
Two details worth knowing. The access does not last forever: once a case is completed, the attorney of record keeps portal access to the eROP for 180 days, after which even the attorney of record must use FOIA. And the access belongs only to the attorney of record — an attorney who has not entered an appearance in your case sees nothing. That boundary is precisely where the current problem lives.
4. FOIA Through the Public Access Link
The Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, gives any person the right to request agency records, and EOIR processes FOIA requests through its online Public Access Link (PAL). For an immigration court file, the request needs the same identifying information as an EOIR-59 — and when someone other than the subject of the file is asking, a signed consent from the subject (the EOIR-59 or Form DOJ-361 serves this purpose). EOIR’s Policy Manual describes the process and warns, sensibly, that no one should wait on a FOIA response before meeting a filing deadline.
FOIA remains the correct route in three situations: the case is closed and archived; the requester is a third party with the subject’s written consent; or the records sought go beyond a single case file. It is also, historically, the route every attorney used to evaluate a prospective client’s old case. That last use is the one now under pressure.
The Gap: Having a Lawyer Review Your File Before You Hire One
Here is the scenario the system now handles worst. You had a case; it went badly; you want a new attorney to look at the file and tell you whether anything can be done. The attorney, sensibly, will not commit to representing you before seeing the record. You, sensibly, do not want to pay for representation before knowing whether representation can help. Someone needs the file, and nobody is the attorney of record.
For decades the answer was routine: the attorney sent EOIR a FOIA request with your signed consent and received the file. In practice this office and others are now seeing those requests come back unprocessed — sometimes within a day — with a letter listing the alternatives: the attorney of record can download the file from ECAS (but there is no attorney of record); the respondent can register for Respondent Access (which many clients cannot manage on their own); or the file can be requested from the court directly (which, for the attorney, would mean filing an EOIR-28 and becoming counsel of record in a case they have not agreed to take).
What makes this genuinely frustrating is that EOIR’s own published guidance endorses the FOIA route for exactly this situation. On its ECAS information page, EOIR poses the question of an attorney who wants “to review an eROP with a respondent’s permission before I agree to represent the respondent” without filing an appearance form — and answers it: “Submit a FOIA request.” One arm of the agency directs the pre-retention attorney to FOIA; another arm returns the FOIA request and points back at the portals. And FOIA itself contains no exemption for records that are theoretically available somewhere else — the statute requires the agency to process a proper request, and a portal that only the subject of the record can register for is not public availability. A returned request can be appealed administratively to the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy within ninety days, and requesters who push back have the better legal argument.
But you do not need to win a FOIA appeal to get your file reviewed. You need the workaround that has been sitting in plain sight since 2022: route one. You — the client — request your own file with an EOIR-59 signed by you and prepared, if you like, by the attorney you are consulting. The court responds to you; you share the file with whomever you choose. No FOIA, no portal registration, no EOIR-28, no one becoming counsel of record prematurely. In this office, when someone arrives with a denial or a difficult history and a prior attorney, this is now the first move: we prepare the request in the consultation, and the evaluation begins when the file arrives.
What Changed in 2025 and 2026: A Dated Snapshot
This section will age, and it is written to be read with its date in mind: July 2026. The pattern across immigration agencies is a migration of records access into online portals, with the traditional request routes narrowing behind it. USCIS stopped accepting FOIA requests by mail for most requesters on January 22, 2026 — all requests now go through its online system. ICE likewise now accepts FOIA requests only through its online portal, with an exception for detained individuals. And EOIR’s FOIA Service Center began treating requests from — or authorized by — people who could use ECAS or Respondent Access as requests to be redirected rather than processed.
Portals are not a bad thing. A respondent who downloads their eROP the same afternoon is better off than one who waited eight months for a FOIA response, and the years of FOIA backlog at every immigration agency are the strongest argument the government has for the new architecture. The problem is what falls through: people who cannot register for a portal, files too old to exist electronically, third parties with legitimate consent, and the pre-retention review this article has been describing. The law has not changed — FOIA still says what it said. Agency practice has changed, and practice is what a request meets first. Expect further movement here, and check the current state of EOIR’s guidance before relying on this snapshot.
Beyond the Court File: Completing the Picture
The ROP tells you what happened in court. Three other records complete the evaluation. The A-file from USCIS, requested through first.uscis.gov, holds everything else: asylum interview notes that may contradict later testimony, border encounter records, prior applications you may have forgotten or never known about, and the enforcement paperwork that often decides what relief is possible. For anyone whose history includes an asylum office interview or a border encounter, the A-file is frequently more revealing than the court file. It is also the file to read before an N-400 is filed, for the reasons in our post on the naturalization application as an audit of your whole file.
The hearing audio, discussed above, must be named in the request or it will not come. And your prior attorney’s file belongs to you: the rules of professional conduct in every state require a lawyer to surrender the client’s file upon termination of representation, and a written request for it is legitimate, ordinary, and usually answered. A new attorney evaluating an ineffective-assistance question wants all three: what the court has, what the government has, and what the prior lawyer had.
For anyone with an arrest or citation in their past, there is a fourth set of records: the criminal history itself, which lives in three systems that give three different answers. Our companion guide explains how to pull your own criminal record from the FBI, the state, and the courts before any filing.
How to Make a Request That Gets Answered
Whatever the route, requests fail for mundane reasons. Send the request to the court where your last hearing was scheduled, not the court where your case began — jurisdiction follows the case. Include the A-number; without it, identification depends on name and date of birth matching the court’s records exactly. Say what you want: the complete ROP, the DAR for specific hearing dates if audio matters, or specific documents if you know what you need — a targeted request for the judge’s written decision and the hearing audio moves faster than a request for a decade-old paper file. State how you want delivery; email is fastest for electronic files. And if your request is not fulfilled, resubmit with corrected information rather than filing a duplicate — duplicate requests slow everyone, including you.
If a deadline is bearing down — a thirty-day appeal window, a motion deadline — do not wait for records that may not come in time. Deadlines in immigration law are unforgiving, and a missing file is not an excuse the Board accepts. In urgent situations, an attorney can also contact the court directly to coordinate access at the court’s discretion, and a congressional inquiry is sometimes worth adding for a request stuck well past normal processing.
What a New Attorney Actually Does With Your File
It may help to know what happens after the file arrives, because it explains why the file comes first. The attorney reads the decision for its stated grounds and checks each against the record: was the evidence actually missing, or filed and ignored? Was testimony actually inconsistent, or is the inconsistency an artifact of interpretation? The attorney maps the deadlines — appeal windows, the ninety-day motion-to-reopen clock, whether equitable tolling is even arguable — and looks for the things that reopen cases: defective notice, ineffective assistance, changed country conditions, relief that existed but was never applied for. Sometimes the honest answer after review is that nothing can be done, and that answer, delivered before you have paid for a doomed motion, is itself worth the cost of getting the file.
Sometimes the file shows that the strongest move is not to fight at all; we explain that analysis on our page about leaving the United States on your own terms.
What the file review is not is a formality. Choosing the right attorney to do it matters less than making sure whoever does it works from the record rather than from a retelling. If your case ended badly and you want to know whether anything can be done — or you simply want to know what is in your file before the government’s next move — Immigration Law of Montana, P.C. can prepare the records requests with you in a single consultation and review what comes back. The file exists. It is yours. Start there.
