The Justice Department has quietly taken steps to shut down what it calls an administrative “amnesty” that has allowed illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. without ever having to face court-ordered deportations.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, in a ruling Friday, told immigration judges they are no longer allowed to shunt cases onto their inactive dockets on the chance that migrants might have a path to some legal status years in the future.
Experts said the decision could apply to hundreds of thousands of cases.
At issue is what’s known as “administrative closure.” That’s when an immigration judge faces a deportation case but doesn’t issue a ruling either granting benefits or ordering deportation. Instead, the case is punted to the inactive docket.
Given that migrants with valid claims usually push to get an affirmative ruling, most of those cases are people who probably deserve deportation, an administration official told The Washington Times.
Use of administrative closure has surged in recent years, leaving a massive pool of illegal immigrants whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can’t get at.
The administration official referred to them as the equivalent of border “got-aways,” or illegal immigrants who evaded capture by the Border Patrol and managed to disappear into the county’s interior.
“It not only adds to the illegal alien population but creates a pull factor to encourage other illegal aliens to come,” the official said.
The BIA’s ruling labeled administrative closure an “amnesty” and ordered judges to curtail its use.
“The board and immigration judges have no authority to use administrative closure as a de facto extra-statutory form of relief that effectively grants amnesty to thousands of removable aliens because they may be eligible for a visa sometime in the future,” BIA Judge Sirce Owen wrote in the court’s opinion.
The specific case involved Sandra Ibarra-Vega, whom the Obama administration brought a deportation case against in 2010. Three years later, though, the Obama team asked, and the judge agreed, to drop the case through “administrative closure.”
In 2018, Ms. Ibarra-Vega applied for a U visa, which is granted to victims or witnesses of certain crimes who are assisting law enforcement investigations.
Eight years later, that petition is still pending in a decades-long backlog.
In 2025, the Homeland Security Department sought to renew the deportation case, but the judge refused, pointing to Ms. Ibarra-Vega’s potential to obtain a U visa in the future, and declined to reopen the case.
Monday’s ruling overturned that decision and set a new precedent that closing cases in this way is no longer allowed.
Congress has allowed just 10,000 U visas to be granted annually, but far more than that apply each year. Under the old policy, the application itself could serve as a defense against deportation.
Andrew “Art’ Arthur, a former immigration judge, said there were 416,000 pending U visa petitions as of last summer.
“This opinion could tank nearly all of them,” said Mr. Arthur, now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.
The Washington Times sought comment from several immigrant rights groups for this story.
Data published late last year showed there were fewer than 180,000 administratively closed cases in 2010. That had grown to about 325,000 cases at the end of the Obama administration.
The tally dropped during the first Trump term, then surged again under President Biden, reaching nearly 390,000 at the end of fiscal year 2024. In 2025, however, the number fell below 340,000.
The Justice Department said the average case has been on its amnesty docket 6,389 days, or more than 17 years.
Despite lacking legal status, they are generally able to get work permits and compete with Americans for jobs, the administration official said.
Judge Owen, in a footnote in her opinion, questioned the entire idea of administrative closure, suggesting it may not be in line with the Constitution.
She said Congress has the power to write immigration law, and allowing the immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, to close cases and effectively block deportations seems to trample on congressional power.
She said that the issue can be argued when the case returns to the lower immigration judge.
While most of the attention in immigration has been on Homeland Security and arrests, the immigration courts have been steadily issuing new decisions and changing rules to streamline deportation cases and create more checks on bogus cases.
Last month, the BIA issued a ruling allowing a U.S. citizen to challenge the immigration status of her own former spouse, who she said had deceived her into a fraudulent marriage in order to gain a path to citizenship.
