The Trump administration won a battle at the Supreme Court today after the court refused to grant immigration judges the power to delay deportations through a process called "administrative closure."
The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to restore a Biden-era regulation that allows immigration judges to suspend some deportation proceedings. In a brief, unsigned order, the court turned down a request from three cities and a group that provides legal services to immigrants to pause an agreement between Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice that threw out the rule.
There were no noted dissents.
The regulation at the center of the dispute, which provides what is known as “administrative closure,” was adopted by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, part of the Department of Justice, in 2024. Under it, immigration judges may suspend some deportation proceedings – for example, to allow a crime victim or witness to seek relief, such as asylum, from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is a separate agency.
This rule had been used increasingly by immigration judges to offer a kind of backdoor amnesty. The number of people granted this pass increased as the caseload of judges increased.
Between 2013 and 2017, the number of removal cases closed using the rule increased from nearly 172,000 to more than 268,000, according to the Trump administration.
During the first Trump administration, the attorney general found that immigration judges lacked the authority “to indefinitely suspend immigration proceedings through administrative closure.”
However, that changed near the end of the Biden administration:
In 2024, the Justice Department issued a new rule that once again gave immigration judges the discretion to halt some deportation proceedings...
In April 2025, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the unit at the Justice Department that runs the immigration courts, issued a memo saying it “could not — and will not — defend” the 2024 rule reinstating the administrative closure process.
Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general in Texas and an ally of Mr. Trump, sued the federal government in June over the 2024 rule, which he argued operated as de facto amnesty because it allowed immigration judges to delay deportation proceedings, in some cases for years...
The two sides were ideologically aligned but formally on opposite sides in a lawsuit. On the same day the lawsuit was filed, the two sides told a judge they had agreed to settle it, ending the matter with a binding agreement removing the immigration judges’ discretion.
That would have been the end of the story except that three cities sued to demand the 2024 process be brought back. The case then made its way through the courts.
On Aug. 7, three cities with large immigrant populations – Baltimore, Maryland; New Haven, Connecticut; and Columbus, Ohio – and Centro Legal de la Raza, which provides legal services to immigrants, filed an emergency motion to join the case so that they could defend the administrative-closure rule on appeal, when neither Texas nor the federal government intended to do so. O’Connor denied their request on the ground that they lacked a legal right to sue, known as standing. In particular, he rejected the cities’ contention that the elimination of the rule would cost them money because their taxpayers are likely to be deported.
The challengers then went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which rejected their request to block the consent judgment between Texas and the Department of Justice and thereby reinstate the administrative-closure rule while their appeal continued.
On Oct. 9, the challengers came to the Supreme Court, calling the consent agreement the product of “egregious collusion” and asking the justices to step in.
Now the Supreme Court has weighed in and this appears to be over.
