ImmigrationReason: A Structured Dataset of U.S. Immigration Appeals for Legal Reasoning Research
Amirhossein Afsharrad, Seyed Shahabeddin Mousavi
Abstract
Most legal NLP resources draw from federal case law and focus on coarse classification, leaving administrative adjudication, where the vast majority of government decisions occur, essentially unaddressed. We introduce ImmigrationReason, a large-scale structured dataset derived from 12,375 non-precedent decisions of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) spanning 2005 to 2026. Each record captures the applicable legal framework, per-criterion evidence-sufficiency findings under a five-category label, verbatim adjudicator-criticism quotes, all citations, and final dispositions, alongside high-quality Claude-transcribed source text. Extraction quality is validated through a three-pass pipeline combining two independent modalities with comparison-prompt adjudication by Opus 4.7, and verified by domain experts on a 500-record sample. The dataset documents nearly 9,000 verbatim instances of AAO-identified legal errors, spans a natural legal-regime transition (the 2016 Dhanasar rule change), and covers 21 years of adjudication. We analyze the dataset in detail and outline research directions it enables, from outcome prediction and adjudicator-error analysis to agent design for high-stakes regulatory domains.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.