EOIR System Update

At midnight on April 12, 2014, the Executive Office for Immigration Review experienced a catastrophic hardware failure that rendered inaccessible many of its applications. Immediately after identifying the problem, our staff began around-the-clock efforts to recover the hardware. We soon began working with data recovery service experts to preserve our data and restore our applications. Included in the inaccessible information were our backup systems.

We are happy to announce that the data recovery team was able to recover the data and create new drives for those which had failed. To date, we have not lost any data, and we are continuing to finalize restoration of those applications most critical to our internal and external stakeholders. As of 9:00 a.m. on May 19, 2014, our electronic databases are again functional. Although the case information hotline (800-898-7180) is also functional, the hotline is limited to providing information recorded in the electronic database, which our staff will continue to update until all case information is current. We are continuing recovery efforts on other applications, including eRegistration.

We appreciate the patience of our stakeholders through this frustrating time. Please know that our information technology staff has worked very hard to make sure that our system has been rebuilt, but we have also worked smart. Our system was reconstructed in a way that provides more and better redundancies and monitoring that will result in a greater assurance such issues will not again present.