Imagine you’re an immigration judge and someone is standing before you, facing deportation. You need to make a decision, but there are complications.  One tool at your disposal is to “administratively close” the case. You haven’t granted the person legal status, but you’ve stopped deportation proceedings — possibly indefinitely.

Administrative closure has huge implications for immigrants and their families. Now, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who oversees immigration judges, is considering limiting that power. Sessions wrote in a recent brief that he would review judges’ authority to administratively close immigration cases.

Administrative closure has been used frequently by judges to drop cases against people who aren’t a priority for deportation or who have other pending legal issues. Critics say it operates as a kind of backdoor amnesty, particularly for people who don’t qualify for other kinds of relief under immigration law. Judges, attorneys and advocates say that ending administrative closure entirely could have a significant impact on individual cases and the immigration court system overall.

There are groups of immigrants for whom administrative closure is particularly important. Someone being deported for a crime but still fighting the conviction may have his or her case closed while an appeal is pending. Another example is the many undocumented children in the United States. They also ask for administrative closure while they’re applying for juvenile protected status, a legal status that can take years to wind its way through state family court and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

This fall, the department proposed setting case completion quotas for judges to try to speed up decision-making. It released a memo in December that reminding judges to act “impartially” when looking at cases involving children, despite their commonly sympathetic stories. DOJ also said judges should give asylum applications more careful scrutiny and be more reluctant to postpone a case.

Read the full article about changes in immigration leading to more deportations by Christie Thompson at The Marshall Project.