Sessions tells immigration courts to try the cases and not put them on suspension list

Washington Times:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a directive to immigration judges Thursday telling them they can no longer shunt deportation cases off onto permanent wait lists and leave illegal immigrants free to roam the U.S.

Known as administrative closure, the wait list had become a favorite tactic of the Obama administration, serving to protect low-priority illegal immigrants from deportation.

Rather than pursue those cases, government attorneys would propose — and judges would grant — administrative closure by shipping more than 200,000 cases to the suspension list in what analysts said became a de facto amnesty.

Mr. Sessions, flexing his attorney general powers, ruled Thursday that the policy rested on shaky legal ground. He issued a precedent telling judges to decide the cases in front of them rather than rely on administrative closure.

“No attorney general has delegated such broad authority, and legal or policy arguments do not justify it. I therefore hold that immigration judges and the Board [of Immigration Appeals] lack this authority except where a previous regulation or settlement agreement has expressly conferred it,” Mr. Sessions said in his decision.

The ruling could, in the short term, speed up deportation decisions on the children and families that have surged into the U.S. over the past five years.

Indeed, it was one of those unaccompanied alien children cases that spurred Mr. Sessions to act.

A 17-year-old named Reynaldo Castro-Tum was nabbed crossing the border illegally in 2014. He was sent to live with his brother-in-law while he awaited deportation.

Mr. Castro-Tum was supposed to come back for his hearing but ignored all five summonses sent from the court to his brother-in-law’s address. Rather than order him deported in absentia, the immigration judge granted an administrative closure, essentially giving the now-adult illegal immigrant a tentative pass.

It was one of more than 215,000 cases shunted onto the administrative closure list from fiscal year 2012 through fiscal year 2017, sending the total off-calendar backlog to more than 350,000 cases. When combined with some 690,000 other pending cases, the immigration court has more than 1 million cases awaiting rulings.
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It looks like these courts were allowing the immigrants to game the system to stay in the US under a defacto amnesty.  That does nothing to deter future illegal entry.