Much of the Center’s work involves poring over government websites, because they often better reflect what’s going on in immigration than official pronouncements or “expert” media analyses do. Head to the website of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — the DOJ component that oversees the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — and you’ll find reference to a secret “amnesty” of nearly 340,000 pending “administrative closure” cases, part of a much larger Biden-era scheme to protect nearly a million aliens from deportation. Those aliens are all removable, but some of their files have nonetheless been shelved for years — and in some cases, before many of you were born.
Administrative Closure
Officially, there are almost 3.8 million pending cases in the immigration court backlog, but more than eight years ago, at the outset of the first Trump administration, I suggested the true number of then-pending cases (a more modest 895,000) was higher than those official statistics displayed, thanks to a legal trick called “administrative closure”.
As the BIA has described the practice: “Administrative closure ... is used to temporarily remove a case from an Immigration Judge's active calendar or from the Board's docket.”
It continued:
[Administrative closure] is a docket management tool that is used to temporarily pause removal proceedings. Administrative closure is not a form of relief from removal and does not provide an alien with any immigration status. After a case has been administratively closed, either party may move to recalendar it before the Immigration Court ... or to reinstate the appeal before the Board. [Emphasis added.]
Put another way, administrative closure allows immigration judges and the BIA to shelve cases that it does not want to, or cannot, deal with, at least at the time of closure.
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