The justices declined to pause a consent judgment that bars immigration judges from indefinitely shelving deportation cases, turning back a bid by an Oakland legal-aid group and three cities.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to disturb a consent judgment between Texas and the Justice Department that wiped out the federal rule allowing immigration judges to take deportation cases off their active calendars, a practice known as administrative closure that has kept hundreds of thousands of cases on hold, many of them for years.
In a one-sentence order, the court said that “the application for stay presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.” No justice noted a dissent. The application, City of Baltimore v. Texas, No. 26A500, was filed on Oct. 9 by Baltimore, Columbus, Ohio, New Haven, Conn., and Centro Legal de la Raza, the Oakland nonprofit that represents immigrants in removal proceedings across the East Bay and San Francisco.
The order leaves intact a June 22 judgment entered by Chief Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas. It vacated a 2024 Biden administration regulation, 89 Fed. Reg. 46742, and barred the department from issuing a similar rule “absent an express statutory basis to do so.”
The administration’s case
The Trump administration did not defend the rule. It agreed with Texas that the rule was unlawful, and told the justices the challengers were trying to use a narrow procedural fight to reopen the merits. In its opposition brief, filed by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the government said the application “attempts to improperly leverage a clear-cut dispute over intervention into a far-reaching attack on the merits of a consent judgment.”
The government’s argument rests on the text of the immigration statute, which says that at the end of a removal proceeding “the immigration judge shall decide whether an alien is removable.” Administrative closure, the brief said, was described as a temporary docket tool but became something closer to permanent: closures before immigration judges last an average of 15 years, and about 29 years before the Board of Immigration Appeals. The brief quoted a 2020 opinion of the Sixth Circuit, Hernandez-Serrano v. Barr, which said that “in hundreds of thousands of cases, administrative closure has amounted to a decision not to apply the Nation’s immigration laws at all.”
The administration also told the court that the judgment is narrower than the challengers described. It “does not require the recalendaring of cases that are currently administratively closed,” the brief said; it applies going forward, preventing judges from closing new cases. In the four months since the judgment was entered, the government said, the applicants had not “pointed to any case that has been recalendared or any removal order that has issued in a case that was previously administratively closed.”
Texas, represented by Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office along with America First Legal, described the 2024 rule in its brief as “one part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s campaign to undermine our immigration laws.” A stay, the state argued, “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 Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts, laid out its reasoning in an April 2025 policy memorandum, PM 25-29, filed in the appendix to the application. The memo said administrative closure “kicks the can down the road” and had operated as a “de facto amnesty program unauthorized by Congress,” and it said the agency “could not—and will not—defend” the 2024 rule. Asked about the practice last year, the agency told NBC News that it had created “a possibly unconstitutional and unlawful amnesty program that allows aliens to remain in the country indefinitely but does not definitively resolve their immigration status,” and that judges “are independent adjudicators and decide all matters before them on a case-by-case basis.”
The challengers’ case
The cities and Centro Legal, represented by Democracy Forward, did not get to argue the merits in the lower courts. Judge O’Connor denied their motion to intervene on Aug. 21, holding that they lacked standing, and the Fifth Circuit refused to pause the judgment on Sept. 29 while it considers their appeal.
In their application, they argued that the case was a form of “rulemaking-by-collusive acquiescence,” in which a new administration that disliked a regulation agreed with a friendly plaintiff to have a court erase it, skipping the notice-and-comment process that federal law requires to repeal a rule. They pointed out that when the first Trump administration restricted administrative closure in 2020, it did so through notice and comment. And they cited a 2022 concurrence by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch, in Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco, which said a “host of important questions” remained unresolved about cases in which an administration stops defending a rule and lets a court set it aside.
That concurrence came in a case that began in San Francisco, over the first Trump administration’s public-charge rule. Four years later, the same concern did not draw a single noted dissent.
The government’s response on that point was procedural: Because the applicants lacked standing to intervene, it argued, they could not challenge the consent judgment at all. “There is no it-takes-one-to-know-one exception to Article III,” the brief said. In a footnote, the department also said it continues to believe that the Administrative Procedure Act does not authorize courts to vacate rules universally, but it did not press the point because Fifth Circuit precedent allows it.
The California numbers
Administrative closure has been used for decades, but the volume changed sharply in the last 15 years. An Inquirer review of the figures in the EOIR memorandum shows how:
From fiscal 1991 through 2011, immigration judges closed an average of 3,697 cases a year. In the five years after the Board of Immigration Appeals broadened the practice in its 2012 decision in Matter of Avetisyan, the average rose to 21,158 a year, nearly six times as many. From fiscal 2022 through 2024, after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland restored the practice, the average was 33,209 a year, about nine times the pre-2012 rate. By April 2025, the memo said, about 379,000 cases were administratively closed.
The memo argues that closure makes the backlog worse. Its own figures support that argument for one period more than another. Between January 2013 and January 2017, the number of closed cases rose by about 56 percent, from about 172,000 to more than 268,000, while the active backlog grew by about the same proportion, from about 550,000 to about 859,000. Between 2021 and 2025, closed cases rose about 41 percent, from about 278,000 to about 392,000, while the backlog more than doubled, from about 1.68 million to more than 4.1 million. Over that later stretch, the backlog grew by roughly 21 cases for every additional case that was closed, which suggests most of the growth came from new filings rather than closures. The memo does not break the figures down by court.
Some California numbers come from other sources. NBC News found that from January through October 2025, the government moved to return more than 30,000 closed cases in California to active dockets, a 14,000 percent increase over the same months of 2024, out of more than 117,000 such requests nationwide. In San Francisco, Mission Local reported, the Department of Homeland Security filed about 2,000 of those motions in the summer of 2025. Shira Levine, who was then a judge on that court, said most were denied as boilerplate, and the motions stopped by the end of August. Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security Department spokeswoman, told NBC News at the time that officials “are following the law and resuming these illegal aliens’ removal proceedings while ensuring their cases are heard by a judge.”
The San Francisco court itself no longer exists as a stand-alone court. The immigration agency closed it on Sept. 4, citing cost-effectiveness. More than 115,000 pending cases were moved, mostly to the Concord Immigration Court, which already had about 59,000, NBC Bay Area reported. The courtroom space at 630 Sansome Street is now a hearing location run from Concord.
What it means for one Oakland legal-aid group
The most specific estimate of the judgment’s local effect comes from a sworn declaration by Abby Sullivan Engen, who directs Centro Legal’s immigrants’ rights practice, dated Aug. 7 and filed in the Supreme Court appendix. At the time, the practice had eight attorneys, three accredited representatives and five support staff, with two more attorneys due to start in August and September. It reports more than 1,600 open matters and estimates that it meets just under 2 percent of the demand for its services.
The declaration estimates that 80 to 100 of the group’s clients have removal cases that are administratively closed, and that at least 50 more clients whose cases were terminated could be affected. Many of those clients are young people seeking Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, asylum seekers who arrived as unaccompanied children, or crime victims applying for U visas. The declaration estimates that each case returned to an active docket would need 40 to 200 additional hours of work.
The Inquirer multiplied those figures. For 130 to 150 clients, they come to about 5,200 to 30,000 hours of work. Spread across the 11 attorneys and accredited representatives the practice had in August, that is roughly 470 to 2,700 hours each, or between a quarter of a year and more than a year of full-time work at 2,000 hours a year. The low end assumes the fewest cases and the fewest hours. These are estimates of possible workload, not counts of cases that have actually been recalendared.
The declaration also explains why waiting matters for these clients. A U visa is capped at 10,000 a year, and more than 260,000 petitions were pending, the declaration says. At that cap, the pending petitions alone represent about 26 years of visas. For a young person who wins special juvenile status, the declaration says, adjusting status before an immigration judge carries a $2,980 fee, while U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services charges no adjustment fee for that population. That is one reason lawyers in the San Francisco and Concord courts typically asked judges to end such cases, rather than keep them open, once a visa became available.
The judgment may reach that practice as well. The declaration says that “at least one Immigration Judge in the San Francisco Immigration Court has raised the question sua sponte whether he has authority to terminate—not only administratively close—removal proceedings.” The 2024 rule covered termination as well as closure, and the judgment vacated the rule.
The administration’s answer to all of this is the one it gave the justices: none of it has happened yet, and much of it may never happen. In their reply, the challengers said that “practitioners have reported another wave of motions to recalendar.”
Centro Legal has been here before. In 2021, it won an injunction in federal court in San Francisco, in Centro Legal de la Raza v. Executive Office for Immigration Review, that blocked the first Trump administration’s 2020 rule on closure and other procedures.
Jessica Flores, Centro Legal’s communications manager, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s order.
How the rule got here
Administrative closure has changed with each administration. The Board of Immigration Appeals broadened it in Avetisyan in 2012. Attorney General Jeff Sessions largely ended it in Matter of Castro-Tum in 2018, writing that “administrative closure is effectively permanent in most instances.” The 2020 rule wrote limits into the regulations, and was enjoined. Mr. Garland revived the practice in Matter of Cruz-Valdez in 2021, and the 2024 rule codified it at 8 C.F.R. 1003.18(c), along with new authority to terminate cases in 1003.18(d).
What distinguishes this round is how it ended. Texas sued on the 2024 rule; the Justice Department agreed with the state; and a judge entered a judgment that no remaining party opposed. Supporters of the outcome say that is what should happen when an agency concludes that its own rule exceeds the statute. Critics say it lets an agency undo a regulation without the public process required to repeal one.
What happens next
The order does not decide the merits. The challengers’ appeal of the intervention ruling remains pending in the Fifth Circuit, No. 26-10794, and the government noted that the challengers had not asked to expedite it.
The Solicitor General’s brief also pointed to a route the justices may see later. Immigrants “who would have been eligible for administrative closure under the vacated rule may be able to collaterally challenge the consent judgment” if judges deny them closure in their own cases. A person in removal proceedings, unlike a city or a legal-aid group, is directly regulated by the rule, which could make standing easier to show.
For now, judges in Concord and in the rest of the country have no regulation authorizing them to shelve a case indefinitely, and cases that were already closed remain closed unless the government or a judge moves to reopen them. The judgment’s language, which bars a replacement rule “absent an express statutory basis,” means that a future administration that wanted to restore the practice would most likely need Congress to act.
Anjali Venkatram covers national news and the federal policies, court rulings and trends that reach California, for National News. More from Anjali Venkatram
