Think Immigration: The BIA Gives Immigration Judges License to Ignore Party Stipulations

If there was any remaining question as to whether the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is a neutral arbiter or a cog in Trump’s deportation machine, the Board of Immigration Appeal’s (BIA) answered that question in, Matter of J-H-M-H-, 29 I&N Dec. 278 (BIA 2025). In J-H-M-H-, the BIA ruled that the immigration judge (IJ) need not accept a stipulation between counsel for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and counsel for the respondent to grant relief to the noncitizen. Of course, in state and federal civil actions, the parties enter into agreements that resolve the issues in the case far more often than cases go to trial. Likewise, in criminal cases, issues are resolved by pleas every day. And DHS is no ordinary party. Congress has delegated DHS the authority to order noncitizens expeditiously removed and, the authority to grant affirmative applications for relief. Indeed, in United States v. Texas, 599 U.S. 670 (2023), the Supreme Court affirmed DHS’s ability to prioritize which noncitizens to remove. Yet Matter of J-H-M-H-essentially directs DHS attorneys that they have one role in immigration court—to fight grants of relief.

In Matter of J-H-M-H-, DHS counsel and respondent’s counsel stipulated to a grant of deferral of removal under the Convention against Torture (CAT). This decision by DHS did not come out of nowhere. Ms. J-H-M-H- is a transgender woman from Honduras. She was sexually abused as a child, presented expert evidence of harm to transgender people in Honduras, including murders, and presented evidence that her brother, who also dressed as a woman, was murdered within days of being deported to Honduras. Despite these facts, the immigration judge rejected this stipulated grant of relief. On appeal, the BIA affirmed the judge’s ability to reject party stipulations, and continued its trend of heightening the CAT standard to an impossible level, finding that Ms. J-H-M-H- had not sufficiently demonstrated that she would be singled out for torture. (This trend to narrow CAT eligibility mirrors the administration’s efforts to end access to asylum, as laid out in this recent AILA Policy Brief.)

The timing of J-H-M-H-, issued less than a month after it issued Matter of H-A-A-V-, 29 I&N Dec. 233 (BIA 2025), is especially telling. Matter of H-A-A-V- encourages immigration judges to pretermit asylum cases without giving applicants a day in court. That decision followed EOIR Policy Memo 25-28 which likewise encourages judges to pretermit asylum applications, citing the backlog of EOIR cases and concluding that to fulfill their “duty to efficiently manage their dockets” judges should take “all appropriate action to immediately resolve cases on their dockets that do not have viable legal paths for relief or protection from removal.”

Together these two decisions make it clear that efficiency in immigration court is a one-way ratchet: noncitizens can be ordered removed without receiving a hearing on their case, but noncitizens cannot receive protection without a hearing even when DHS agrees it is warranted.

Additional resources:

• Policy Brief: Chaotic Policy Changes Are Ending Access to Asylum in America
• Policy Brief: USCIS’s Unlawful Asylum Dismissals Increase Government Inefficiency and Harm Asylum Seekers
• Policy Brief: ICE Arrests at Immigration Courts

Victoria Neilson is a supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project and a member of the AILA National EOIR Committee