When I hear Baltimore v. Texas, I usually think of a series at Camden Yards. Here, however, it’s the new name of a lawsuit brought by three cities (Baltimore, Md., New Haven, Conn., and Columbus, Ohio) and one NGO to restore a key tool — “administrative closure” — the Biden administration used in support of what staff at the House Judiciary Committee termed its “Quiet Amnesty” benefitting removable aliens in the United States. And last week, the Supreme Court refused to reinstate it.
'Administrative Closure'
The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — the DOJ tribunal that reviews immigration decisions — has described administrative closure as “a procedural tool created for the convenience of the Immigration Courts and the Board” that:
is available to an Immigration Judge and the Board ... to temporarily remove a case from an Immigration Judge's active calendar or from the Board's docket. In general, administrative closure may be appropriate to await an action or event that is relevant to immigration proceedings but is outside the control of the parties or the court and may not occur for a significant or undetermined period of time.
Don’t search the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) for that “procedural tool”, however. It’s a thing immigration judges (IJs) and the BIA crafted all by themselves, and it wasn’t until late in the Biden administration that it received much attention in the implementing regulations.
Note that the Supreme Court maintains there’s a “strong public interest” in bringing immigration cases “to a close as promptly as is consistent with the interest in giving the adversaries a fair opportunity to develop and present their respective cases”, and when the justices said “to a close”, they didn’t mean administrative closure — they meant real closure, with a final order for the government or alien.
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