Reynaldo Castro-Tum crossed into the U.S. from Guatemala at 17 and was placed in deportation proceedings. He was supposed to appear before an immigration judge. He missed one hearing, then another, and in the end he skipped five.
The judge didn't order him deported. The judge closed his case, along with 10 others where the immigrants hadn't shown up either.
That's administrative closure. For years, immigration judges used it to make deportation cases disappear without ever deciding them. A judge took the case off the active docket, and unless someone asked to put it back, it just sat there. It was technically still open, but nobody decided it, and the person at the center of it stayed in the country, sometimes for years.
The numbers piled up fast. According to the Trump administration, cases that were closed but never decided grew from about 172,000 in 2013 to more than 268,000 in 2017.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to bring the practice back, and not a single justice publicly dissented.
Trump's first administration had already shut it down. In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions used Castro-Tum's case to rule that immigration judges didn't have the power "to indefinitely suspend immigration proceedings through administrative closure." The Biden administration brought it back, and in 2024 wrote it into federal rules.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued, calling the rule what it was: "de facto amnesty." Illegal immigrants could stay in the country while their cases gathered dust, and Texas paid the price in what his office called "fiscal, public safety, and sovereign harms."
The Trump administration didn't argue. In April 2025, the acting head of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the immigration courts, had already said the agency "could not — and will not — defend" the Biden rule. So when Paxton filed suit, Texas and the Justice Department settled the same day and agreed to end the practice. Federal Judge Reed O'Connor signed off on the deal.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, three Democratic-run cities, Baltimore, New Haven, and Columbus, jumped in, along with a California immigrant legal group called Centro Legal de la Raza.
Their main complaint was that Texas and the federal government were on the same side, so they called the settlement collusion.
Elections have consequences. Voters picked a president who promised to enforce immigration law, and his administration is doing it. When a state sues to stop a bad rule and the federal government agrees the rule is bad, the system is working the way it's supposed to.
The cities' other arguments didn't help. They said they'd lose tax revenue if illegal immigrants living in their cities got deported. That's an unusual argument for a city to make in front of the Supreme Court. They also said crime victims might stop cooperating with police if their deportation cases started moving again.
None of it worked. O'Connor ruled the cities didn't have standing to challenge the deal at all. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices the rule governs immigrants facing deportation, not cities, so Baltimore, New Haven, and Columbus had no business intervening. The 5th Circuit refused to block the settlement. Then the Supreme Court turned the cities away too, in a one-sentence order.
From now on, deportation cases stay on the docket until a judge decides them. Either a person has a legal right to stay in the country or they don't, and the judge has to say which.
At the peak, more than 268,000 deportation cases were sitting on the shelf. Under the ruling, judges can no longer put them there.