The Supreme Court just shut down a Biden-era regulation that let immigration judges unilaterally shelve deportation cases, restoring a basic principle: if you're in this country illegally, the government can actually remove you.
The unsigned order Tuesday had no noted dissents. The high court declined to restore a 2024 rule adopted by the DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review that allowed immigration judges to use "administrative closure" — effectively suspending deportation proceedings indefinitely without a trial. Texas sued in June, calling the rule "one part of the Biden-Harris Administration's campaign to undermine our immigration laws." Rather than defend it, the Trump DOJ asked the court to block the regulation permanently. The requests were granted.
Three cities with large migrant populations — Baltimore, New Haven, and Columbus — along with the legal group Centro Legal de la Raza, scrambled to intervene. They claimed the rule helped crime victims and neglected juveniles. A judge denied their request, saying they lacked standing. The Fifth Circuit agreed. They ran to the Supreme Court on October 9, arguing the Texas-DOJ agreement was the product of "egregious collusion." The justices weren't buying it. The Justice Department told the Court the cities had no legal standing and couldn't show immediate harm.
Here's what the establishment press won't emphasize: the scale of what this loophole enabled. A House Judiciary Committee report from October 2024 found that under Biden, over 700,000 migrant cases were dismissed, terminated, or administratively closed — "allowing those aliens to stay in the country indefinitely without facing immigration consequences." The pace accelerated every year. Just 5,214 administrative closures in FY2021 ballooned to 35,775 in FY2022. For asylum cases alone, judges administratively closed 58,463 cases from FY2021 through Q3 FY2024, compared to just 13,590 under the Trump administration — including a mere 132 in FY2019.
The New York Post framed the rule as one that "allowed judges to pause some deportation proceedings" and led with the cities' claim that it helped crime victims. The Post Millennial called it what it functionally was: allowing judges to "give amnesty by closing deportation cases without trial." That's the real friction. Administrative closure wasn't a pause — it was a de facto amnesty program dressed up in procedural language, letting hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens remain in the country with no legal status and no path to removal.
The petitioners' attorney warned that if this kind of settlement stands, any agency can sidestep federal administrative law "by advertising its unwillingness to defend a disfavored regulation and by immediately acquiescing to nationwide relief." That's a fair structural concern — but it cuts both ways. The Biden EOIR created this rule through executive action. The Trump DOJ undid it the same way. The question isn't process; it's whether immigration enforcement means anything at all.
The open question now: what happens to those 700,000+ cases already closed? The Supreme Court blocked the going-forward rule. Reopening those shelved cases will take resources and political will the administration may or may not have.
