The Trump administration has quietly reached a deal to erase a Biden-era policy that let immigration judges put off rulings on deportation cases and gave migrants an indefinite amnesty to remain in the U.S. despite lacking a legal visa to do so.
The practice, known as “administrative closure,” was used to delay rulings on hundreds of thousands of deportation cases, letting those migrants remain free in the U.S.
Texas and the Justice Department reached a consent decree this week to scuttle the Biden-era practice, and U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee to the court in Texas, quickly signed off on it, forbidding the Trump team and future administrations from reviving the practice.
“Defendants, as well as their successors, agents, subordinate agencies, and employees, are permanently enjoined from promulgating regulations that permit immigration judges the authority to administratively close removal proceedings without reaching the merits of a case absent an express statutory basis to do so,” the judge wrote Monday.
The case was the latest example of conservatives using sue-and-settle to undo policy.
Sue-and-settle cases work when the litigants — both the plaintiffs and the administration — share the same goal. It’s a way of erasing a previous administration’s policies without going through the usual regulatory process and getting a court’s blessing.
Left-wing environmentalists have been particularly adept at using sue-and-settle, in cooperation with Democratic administrations. But conservatives have been fighting back, using the tool in immigration and voting rights cases with the Trump administration.
In this latest case, the target was a 2024 regulation known as the Administrative Closure Rule.
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said judges needed more flexibility to deal with the bloated immigration docket. He said letting immigration judges suspend a case would give them a chance to shunt aside lower-priority cases and focus on more pressing cases.
Critics said the result was hundreds of thousands of cases left in limbo, giving the migrants in question a tacit amnesty, or permission to stay — and even apply for a work permit — while their case remained inactive.
The immigration court backlog surged under President Biden, rising from about 1.5 million in 2020 to about 4 million in 2024.
Under President Trump, that was cut to about 3.6 million by March.
Part of that was the change at the border. Mr. Biden was adding more than a million cases a year in 2023 and 2024, while under Mr. Trump the figure was just 562,000 in 2025.
And immigration judges are completing more cases, with the administration on pace for 800,000 cases closed this year. That would be an all-time record.
America First Legal, which helped Texas bring the lawsuit, said the consent decree shuts down a “backdoor amnesty program” that helped hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants avoid deportation consequences.
“This settlement is one more step in the long process of unwinding the open-border disaster of the Biden years and restoring the integrity of our immigration system,” said James Rogers, senior counsel at America First Legal.
The case was settled with startling speed, preventing immigrant-rights advocates from trying to intervene.
The complaint, consent decree and Judge O’Connor’s ruling accepting the decree were all docketed Monday.
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