The Supreme Court on Tuesday, October 27, refused to suspend a federal judgment that ended immigration judges' formal power to pause deportation cases, a practice known as administrative closure. The one-sentence order in City of Baltimore v. Texas gave no reasons and noted no dissents. It does not decide whether the judgment, or the practice, is lawful. It leaves the judgment in place while three cities and an immigrant legal-services group appeal a Texas judge's ruling that they have no standing to challenge it. Texas and the Trump administration say administrative closure let people without legal status remain for years, even decades, without a decision, in effect an amnesty. The challengers say the two sides, who agreed with each other from the start, used a lawsuit to erase a regulation without the public notice and comment that federal law requires to repeal one. Texas answers that the challengers' argument "conflates agency repeal with judicial relief": a court "may set aside an unlawful rule under § 706 without conducting the notice-and-comment proceedings that § 553 requires of agencies."
Administrative closure takes a case off an immigration judge's active calendar without ending it, and either side can later ask to put it back. The challengers' example is a crime victim with a pending application for a U visa, a visa for victims who help police, who could be spared from fighting a removal case while a separate agency decides that application. The government's figures, from the immigration court office's own memo, show how much the practice was used: closed cases "increased from nearly 172,000 to over 268,000" between January 2013 and January 2017, and closures before immigration judges have lasted "an average of 15 years." The office's latest statistics, which label administratively closed cases "amnesty cases," counted 309,677 of them in the immigration courts and at the Board of Immigration Appeals as of June 30, 2026, down from 389,076 at the end of September 2024, and put the average closure in the immigration courts at about 18 years; the statistics do not say why the number fell.
How the rule ended
Federal courts had divided over whether immigration judges have this power. In May 2018, during President Trump's first term, the attorney general ruled that the regulations did not give judges "general authority" to close cases. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit disagreed in 2019, holding that the regulations "unambiguously confer" that authority and warning that the 2018 decision would lead "to the reopening of over 330,000 cases upon the motion of either party, straining the burden on immigration courts" it was meant to relieve. The Sixth Circuit sided with the attorney general in a 2-1 decision in 2020, noting that more than 350,000 closed cases had not been reopened as of October 2018 and writing, "An adjudicatory default on that scale strikes directly at the rule of law"; the dissenting judge sided with the Fourth and Seventh Circuits. In 2021 the attorney general overruled the 2018 decision, citing appeals courts that had rejected its reasoning and its departure from long-standing practice. Those rulings concerned the older regulations.
The Biden administration wrote the practice into a regulation in May 2024 after public comment. In April 2025, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department office that runs the immigration courts, issued a memo concluding that administrative closure as codified in the 2024 rule is unlawful and that the office "could not—and will not—defend the [2024] Rule in good faith against legal challenge," while telling judges the rule remained binding. On June 22, 2026, Texas sued in the Wichita Falls division of the federal court for the Northern District of Texas. The same day, Texas and the Justice Department jointly asked for a consent judgment, and U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor entered it. The judgment declared that "no statute authorizes immigration judges to indefinitely administratively close or suspend adjudication of a case before them." It vacated the 2024 rule nationwide and permanently barred the department from issuing any regulation allowing closure "without reaching the merits of a case absent an express statutory basis to do so." Both parties waived appeal.
Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; New Haven, Connecticut; and Centro Legal de la Raza, an Oakland legal-services provider, asked in August to intervene so they could appeal. O'Connor ruled on August 21 that none of them had standing. He and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to pause the judgment, and the challengers, represented by the group Democracy Forward, applied on October 9 to Justice Samuel Alito, who referred the request to the full Court.
What each side argued
The challengers called the case "an egregious new extension" of what Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Alito and Neil Gorsuch, flagged in 2022, quoting Ninth Circuit Judge VanDyke, as "rulemaking-by-collusive acquiescence." In the challengers' description, that is when a new administration hostile to its predecessor's rule uses a lawsuit brought by an ideologically aligned party to get around the notice-and-comment process. The challengers also noted that the judgment was entered the day the suit was filed and threw out the entire rule, including parts Texas had not challenged. The cities said more deportations would cost them income-tax revenue and make immigrant crime victims less willing to help police, and Centro Legal said it represents 80 to 100 people whose cases are closed. Texas replied that the Court "has issued no holding adopting that label as a doctrine," and that the 2022 concurrence "expressly identified multiple unresolved antecedent issues and joined dismissal of the writ."
Solicitor General D. John Sauer answered that the cities and the group are not regulated by the rule and rely on a "convoluted" chain of guesses about future removals. When they argued that Texas's own standing rested on the same logic, he replied that "there is no it-takes-one-to-know-one exception to Article III." Immigrants denied closure in the future, he wrote, may be able to challenge the judgment themselves. Texas, represented by Attorney General Ken Paxton's office and America First Legal, argued that a stay "would revive a rule the district court declared unlawful, renew the fiscal and sovereign injuries Texas alleged, and unsettle a final judgment accepted by the actual parties."
The two sides also disagree about what the judgment does in practice. Sauer told the Court it "does not require the recalendaring of cases that are currently administratively closed" and only stops judges from closing new ones, and that in four months the challengers had not identified a single reopened case. The challengers replied that more removals are "the whole point" of the judgment, and cited a September report by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network that "practitioners have reported another wave of motions to recalendar" filed by government lawyers after the ruling. Law Commentary, citing the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, reported that some immigration courts had begun reopening closed cases by September.
What comes next
"Eliminating these protections puts vulnerable people at greater risk of deportation and undermines public safety in communities across the country," the challengers and their lawyers said in a statement after the order. The Justice Department and the Texas attorney general's office did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment. The cities and Centro Legal have appealed both the denial of intervention and the judgment itself. The Fifth Circuit, which in September also refused to summarily reverse the denial of intervention, has not decided the appeal; under a briefing notice it issued on October 22, the challengers' opening brief is due December 1. Texas and the federal government argue that the challengers cannot reach the merits unless they first win the right to intervene. The case is separate from Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, the mandatory-detention case the Supreme Court agreed on October 1 to hear.
The same appeals court has already ruled on a similar arrangement. In June 2025 the Justice Department sued Texas over a state law giving in-state college tuition to some students without legal status; Texas agreed that the law conflicted with federal law, and O'Connor entered a consent judgment the same day. In July 2026 a divided Fifth Circuit panel upheld his refusal to let two advocacy groups, a community college and a student intervene, holding that their defense of the Texas law would be futile because federal law overrides it, and dismissed the rest of their appeal, including their challenge to the consent judgment itself, because as nonparties they could not appeal it. That ruling turned on the validity of the Texas law, not on standing, the ground O'Connor gave in the immigration case. The dissenting judge would have sent the case back for O'Connor to decide first whether there had been a genuine dispute between adverse parties, which a federal court needs before it can rule, and, even if there had been one, would have held that the federal law could not override the Texas statute.
This article reflects reporting through the morning of Friday, October 30, 2026. Sources: the Supreme Court's October 27 order and docket, including the application and consent judgment, the federal response, Texas's response and the reply; Reuters, October 27; The New York Times, via the Philadelphia Inquirer; ABC News; Law Commentary; SCOTUSblog; the Supreme Court's docket in Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha; the Fifth Circuit docket, via CourtListener; the Executive Office for Immigration Review's statistics on administratively closed cases, by fiscal year and by presidential term, generated July 24, 2026; the Fifth Circuit's July 2026 opinion in the Texas tuition case; Texas Public Radio; NBC News; Spectrum News.
