The full reportThe full report

Summary

On Tuesday, October 27, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to pause an agreement between Texas and the Justice Department that ended "administrative closure," a practice that let immigration judges take deportation cases off their active calendars without deciding them. Three cities, Baltimore, Columbus and New Haven, and an immigrant legal services group had asked the court to step in. The order is one sentence, unsigned, with no noted dissents and no explanation. It does not decide whether administrative closure is lawful, and an appeal is still pending in a lower court.

What happened

The Supreme Court's docket records the decision in one line: the application for a stay "presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied" (docket 26A500). The order came four days after the last brief was filed (SCOTUSblog).

The applicants were the City of Baltimore, the City of Columbus, the City of New Haven and Centro Legal de la Raza, a legal services nonprofit in Oakland, California, represented by the Democracy Forward Foundation (application). The federal government, through Solicitor General D. John Sauer, and Texas opposed the request. The agreement stays in place while the litigation continues (Reuters, via The Spokesman-Review).

What administrative closure is

The 2024 rule, which the judgment vacated, defined administrative closure as "the temporary suspension of a case." A closed case left the judge's active calendar, and either side could later ask to put it back on (application, citing 8 C.F.R. § 1003.18(c)).

An example: a woman in deportation proceedings is married to a U.S. citizen who has filed a family visa petition for her with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a separate agency. If the petition is approved, she may be able to get legal status, and the deportation case would no longer be needed. Instead of holding hearings while she waits, the judge closes the case. The Justice Department's 2024 rule names a pending application with USCIS as a case where closure can help, because approval could eliminate "the need for further removal proceedings" (Federal Register).

How many cases: EOIR figures cited by the Attorney General in 2018 count 283,366 administratively closed cases from fiscal 1980 to fiscal 2011 and another 215,285 from October 2011 to September 2017 (Matter of Castro-Tum). TRAC counts 3,037,800 active cases pending in immigration court at the end of September 2026 (TRAC).

How we got here

• January 31, 2012: In Matter of Avetisyan, the Board of Immigration Appeals held that judges may administratively close a case even if one side objects (Castro-Tum; Federal Register, 2023).
• May 17, 2018: In Matter of Castro-Tum, Attorney General Jeff Sessions held that judges and the Board "do not have the general authority" to suspend cases indefinitely this way (decision).
• 2019–2021: The Fourth Circuit (Romero v. Barr, August 29, 2019), the Seventh Circuit (Meza Morales v. Barr, 2020) and the Third Circuit (Arcos Sanchez, 2021) rejected Castro-Tum (Federal Register, 2023). The Sixth Circuit agreed with it (Hernandez-Serrano v. Barr, November 24, 2020).
• December 16, 2020: A Justice Department rule limiting administrative closure was published. A federal court in California blocked it on March 10, 2021, in a suit led by Centro Legal de la Raza (Federal Register, 2024).
• July 15, 2021: In Matter of Cruz-Valdez, Attorney General Merrick Garland overruled Castro-Tum in full and restored the earlier standards (Federal Register, 2023).
• May 29, 2024: EOIR published a rule that put administrative closure into regulation and rescinded the 2020 rule. It took effect July 29, 2024 (Federal Register).
• April 18, 2025: EOIR's acting director issued a memo calling the 2024 rule unlawful and saying the agency "could not—and will not—defend" it, while leaving it binding on judges (federal response).
• June 22, 2026: Texas sued in Wichita Falls (N.D. Tex., No. 7:26-cv-00070). The same day, Texas and the Justice Department jointly asked for a consent judgment, and Chief U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor entered it. It declares that no statute authorizes judges to indefinitely close cases, vacates the whole 2024 rule nationwide, bars its enforcement, bars future rules allowing closure "absent an express statutory basis," and records that both parties waived appeal (Texas's response).
• August–September 2026: The cities and Centro Legal moved to intervene on August 7. Judge O'Connor ruled they lacked standing on August 21 and denied a stay on September 2. The Fifth Circuit denied a stay on September 29 (application).
• October 9–27, 2026: The application was filed with the Supreme Court on October 9, the responses on October 22 and the reply on October 23. The court denied it on October 27 (docket).

What each side says

Texas and the administration. Texas's complaint says the rule let people "remain indefinitely in the United States by administrative closure rather than having their cases adjudicated to completion, and removed," and quotes the 2025 EOIR memo saying closure "often functions as a de facto amnesty program." The complaint also cites the Attorney General's 2018 finding that fewer than a third of cases closed since 1980 had been put back on the calendar, and the memo's figures: closed cases rose from nearly 278,000 in January 2021 to almost 392,000 in January 2025, while the backlog rose from about 1.68 million to over 4.1 million (complaint, in the application appendix). At the Supreme Court, Texas argued that a stay "would revive a rule the district court declared unlawful" and that the cities' claimed harm depends on a chain of events no declaration ties to a single taxpayer. Texas answered the collusion charge directly: "Texas is a separate sovereign alleging concrete injuries from a binding federal rule. The Federal Government's decision to acknowledge legal error neither manufactured those injuries nor erased the Rule's legal effect." On the long history of the practice, Texas wrote: "Administrative agencies cannot acquire power through repetition" (Texas's response). The Solicitor General wrote that the applicants "press highly attenuated theories of injury," that "there is no it-takes-one-to-know-one exception to Article III," that "objections about the merits of a consent judgment are no substitute for the threshold prerequisites of Article III standing," that the judgment "does not require the recalendaring of cases that are currently administratively closed" and "applies prospectively," and that people denied closure later may be able to challenge it in their own cases (federal response).

The cities and Centro Legal. The applicants say the rule codified a practice used when closing a case "would promote efficiency or protect due process rights." They say the government "announced in advance that it would not defend a disfavored regulation and then colluded with the challenger from the moment that suit was filed," so the rule was "erased over the course of a single day, without meaningful judicial review, public participation," or the usual rulemaking steps, and that the judgment struck the whole rule though Texas challenged only its closure provisions. They say the practice "has existed in some form for decades" and that EOIR "used notice-and-comment procedures" to adopt the rule. The cities cite lost income-tax revenue and crime victims who may stop cooperating with police. On standing, they argue their injuries mirror Texas's: "If Texas's stake in the Rule's vacatur was concrete enough to support a judgment, Applicants' stake in its survival is concrete enough to support intervention." Centro Legal says it represents 80 to 100 people whose cases are closed. They argue that if the judgment stands, "any agency can avoid the strictures of the APA by advertising its unwillingness to defend a disfavored regulation and by immediately acquiescing to nationwide relief" (application).

What happens next

The cities' and Centro Legal's appeal of the intervention denial and the judgment is pending at the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans (No. 26-10794) (docket; Reuters, via The Spokesman-Review). The Supreme Court's order did not rule on the merits. The two sides disagree about cases that are already closed: the government says the judgment does not require reopening them, and the applicants say reopening them would follow from it.

How it was covered

10 of the 15 outlets on our panel covered the order: 3 of 5 on the left, 3 of 5 in the center and 4 of 5 on the right (checked October 28, 2026). The Reel showed one headline per side: The Washington Post, "Trump administration can block immigration judges from closing deportation cases"; Reuters, "US Supreme Court denies immigration judges the power to shelve deportation cases"; and Fox News, "Trump's unusual legal gambit against Biden-era deportation rule pays off at Supreme Court." We did not find coverage from CNN, MS NOW, The Hill, BBC News or The Washington Times. Every outlet's headline, link and date is on the [story page](/stories/fh001-admin-closure/#coverage). [How we rate outlets and count coverage](/method/).

Sources

The [story page](/stories/fh001-admin-closure/#sources) lists the main sources; every other source is linked in the text above.

Corrections

None as of October 28, 2026. See the [corrections log](/stories/fh001-admin-closure/#corrections).