Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC)

Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York · offices in Philadelphia, PA and West Coast · Washington, D.C. bureau

Status note: In February 2025, as reported by the Houston Chronicle, the TRAC immigration databases became unavailable at the Syracuse University domain trac.syr.edu and migrated to the independent domain tracreports.org. The circumstances of the migration — whether initiated by TRAC, the university, or external pressure — have not been fully disclosed. The migration coincided with the early weeks of the Trump administration's intensified immigration enforcement and its reported pressure on universities and institutions to restrict access to immigration data. TRAC continues to operate and publish at tracreports.org.

Overview

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is a nonpartisan data gathering, research, and distribution organization founded in 1989 at Syracuse University that has spent more than three decades systematically extracting, verifying, and publishing federal government data that agencies prefer to keep opaque. It is co-directed by Susan B. Long, an associate professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse's Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and David Burnham, a veteran investigative reporter at the New York Times who is best known as the journalist who, alongside police officer Frank Serpico, exposed rampant corruption at the New York City Police Department in the early 1970s — the story that became the Al Pacino film Serpico. The combination of a statistician's rigor and an investigative reporter's instinct for what government agencies are hiding defines TRAC's institutional character and explains why its data is trusted by journalists, academic researchers, lawyers, and congressional oversight staff alike. The organization is best known publicly for its immigration court data — the most comprehensive publicly available database on US immigration enforcement, court proceedings, judge decision patterns, and asylum outcomes — but its work spans federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, DEA, IRS, ATF, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as federal judicial data and government spending and staffing.

Founding: A Pulitzer, a Statistician, and the IRS

TRAC's founding story begins with a data gap. Investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele — who had won Pulitzer Prizes in 1975 and 1989 for their reporting on the Internal Revenue Service — needed IRS data they could not obtain from the agency itself. Susan Long, then director of the Center for Tax Studies at Syracuse, had the data. The contact led Long to a broader realization: the kinds of granular transactional records that would allow any serious researcher to understand what federal agencies were actually doing — as distinct from what they said they were doing — were systematically inaccessible, scattered across agencies in inconsistent formats, or simply withheld. Long and Burnham founded TRAC in 1989 to address that gap systematically, using the Freedom of Information Act as the primary legal instrument and statistical verification methods as the quality control mechanism. The TRAC website launched in 1996, making the accumulated data accessible to anyone with an internet connection rather than only to researchers who could travel to Syracuse or Washington.

Data Collections and Tools

TRAC Immigration

TRAC's most widely used collection: immigration court proceedings going back to the 1990s, organized by charge type, immigrant nationality, judge asylum grant rates by court location, border patrol arrest data, detention facility data, and asylum filing backlogs. Used extensively by journalists, lawyers, advocacy organizations, and researchers. Data is aggregate — individual immigrants are not identifiable. Most data is free to access.

tracreports.org/immigration

TRAC Federal Courts

Data on federal civil and criminal court activities, prosecution patterns, case outcomes, and judge performance metrics. Includes a Judge Information Tool launched in 2014 tracking federal district court judges on disparities in outcomes including asylum decisions. Detailed court data is available by subscription; aggregate reports are freely available.

TRAC FBI / DEA / ATF / IRS / DHS

Agency-specific data collections covering enforcement, staffing, prosecution, and spending patterns at the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, Internal Revenue Service, and Department of Homeland Security. IRS data collection predates TRAC's formal founding.

The FOIA Project

An initiative to monitor and document federal agency responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests — tracking speed, refusal rates, and patterns of "improper withholding" by agency and district, with the stated goal of shaming agencies into compliance and building public pressure for reform. Has filed multiple federal lawsuits against agencies including DHS, ICE, the IRS, and the Justice Department. Funded in part by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation alongside other philanthropic supporters.

foiaproject.org

TRACFED

A federal data warehouse providing compiled information on federal enforcement (criminal, civil, and administrative), staffing, and funding across multiple agencies and districts. Designed for longitudinal comparison — how an agency or prosecutor's record in one community compares with others, and how activities have changed across administrations.

Special Advisories and Reports

TRAC publishes original analysis reports and special advisories accompanying new data releases — translating statistical findings into accessible journalistic and policy language. These include findings such as: the IRS auditing families earning under $25,000 five times more often than other income groups (2022); 50,000 asylum records disappearing from government databases (2022); systematic deletion of immigration court records under Trump's first-term Justice Department (2019).

TRAC's Founders and Institutional Character

David Burnham's journalism career before TRAC established the investigative credibility the organization has carried ever since. After his New York Police Department corruption reporting in the early 1970s, he spent years at the New York Times covering law enforcement, government accountability, and federal agencies. His 1990 book A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics, and the IRS drew on his TRAC data collection work to document bribery, corruption, and unchecked bureaucratic expansion at the IRS — a study that remains one of the more detailed accounts of that agency's institutional culture. His working method — find out what the government says it is doing, then find the transactional data that shows what it is actually doing — became TRAC's founding methodology.

Susan Long brings to that method the statistical discipline to ensure the data means what it appears to mean. TRAC's verification process — checking raw government data for accuracy, completeness, and internal consistency before releasing it — is what distinguishes TRAC's output from simple document dumps. Government agencies routinely transmit data with errors, gaps, inconsistencies, and formatting problems that can produce misleading conclusions if not caught; Long's team catches them. The combination of Burnham's reporting instinct — which asks what agencies are hiding and where the interesting discrepancy lies — and Long's statistical rigor — which asks whether the data actually supports the conclusion — has produced an organization whose outputs are trusted across the ideological spectrum, by journalists at the New York Times and the Daily Wire alike, because neither Left nor Right benefits from inaccurate government accountability data.

The February 2025 Migration

In early February 2025, the TRAC website at trac.syr.edu became unavailable. The Houston Chronicle's Matt Zdun reported on February 3, 2025 that TRAC's immigration databases had been moved to the new independent domain tracreports.org. The circumstances were not formally explained by TRAC or by Syracuse University. The timing — in the opening weeks of the second Trump administration, as the administration was intensifying immigration enforcement and reportedly pressuring universities and research institutions on immigration-related work — attracted significant attention from journalists and press freedom organizations. TRAC has continued to publish data and reports at tracreports.org, and the immigration databases remain accessible. Whether the migration from a university domain to an independent domain represents a precautionary preservation measure, a response to institutional pressure, or a planned operational change has not been publicly clarified as of the time of this writing.

FOIA Litigation and Government Resistance

TRAC's work has required sustained legal action against federal agencies that have resisted its data requests. The organization has filed federal FOIA lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of Personnel Management, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Executive Office for US Attorneys, among others. In May 2017, TRAC sued ICE for withholding records on immigration detainers — the requests ICE makes to local law enforcement to hold individuals for possible deportation — at a time when the Trump administration was making detainers a centerpiece of its enforcement strategy. In 2019, TRAC documented the systematic deletion of immigration court records by the Trump Justice Department — a finding that raised serious questions about the integrity of official government data on immigration enforcement. In September 2007, US District Judge Norman Mordue ruled against TRAC in a case about federal employee information, finding that such data could be withheld; the organization has continued to litigate related matters.

Media Impact and Usage

TRAC data has been cited in hundreds of news articles, congressional hearings, court filings, and academic papers. Its immigration court data was featured in a segment of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. A 2009 New York Times report used TRAC data to document backlogged immigration courts; a 2020 CNN report cited the same ongoing problem. Houston Public Media used TRAC asylum data to show that Houston judges denied asylum at vastly higher rates than courts in other cities. Journalists Resource, the Harvard Kennedy School's guide to research for journalists, devoted a dedicated guide to using TRAC's data tools — among its most-read pieces. The Journalist's Resource update in February 2025 noting the migration from trac.syr.edu to tracreports.org reflects the significance of TRAC as infrastructure for immigration journalism: its data is not merely useful but, for many stories, irreplaceable.

Access and Usage

Most of TRAC's immigration data is freely available at tracreports.org without subscription, including interactive tools for exploring immigration court proceedings, detention data, asylum filings and backlogs, border patrol arrest data, and judge-level decision patterns. Detailed federal civil and criminal court data is available by subscription. TRAC's special advisories, reports, and data documentation are free. The FOIA Project is at foiaproject.org. Journalists and researchers unfamiliar with TRAC's data tools can access Journalist's Resource's guide at journalistsresource.org. TRAC can be reached at its Syracuse office at (315) 443-3563, its Washington DC office at (202) 244-4377, and its West Coast branch at (425) 746-6372.