Cahuec Tzalam: A USCIS Receipt Will Not Hold Off a Removal Case

A state court has found that you cannot be reunited with a parent because of abuse, neglect or abandonment. You file a petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for special immigrant juvenile classification, known as SIJ. Then a notice arrives for immigration court. You ask the judge to set the removal case aside until USCIS decides. Will that work?

Not on a receipt, the Board of Immigration Appeals held. A young man from Guatemala won administrative closure from an immigration judge by showing that he had filed a SIJ petition. The Board reversed and put his removal case back on the calendar. He had given the judge no evidence that he qualified. And even if he had, the wait for a visa was too long.

The case is Matter of Cahuec Tzalam, 29 I&N Dec. 300, Interim Decision 4138 (BIA Nov. 14, 2025). Its second reason is the harder one. It reaches young people with strong petitions, and a later decision applied the same logic to a petition USCIS had already approved.

A teenager, a receipt and a five-year line

He entered the United States on December 23, 2023, without inspection, at age 16. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) served him with a notice to appear. On April 23, 2025, he filed his SIJ petition with USCIS and gave the immigration judge a copy of the receipt notice. He then moved to close his case administratively while USCIS decided. DHS objected. The judge granted the motion on June 20, 2025.

DHS appealed, and the Board took the appeal even though it does not usually hear appeals before a case is over. It said it wanted “to insure proper use of the administrative closing procedure.” The young man, now 18, had no lawyer on appeal. The Board asked both sides for more briefing. Only DHS filed one.

Closure is a calendar tool, and the Board wants less of it

Administrative closure takes a case off a judge’s active calendar for a while. It “is not a form of relief from removal and does not provide an alien with any immigration status.” When one side objects, the Board explained, the judge should weigh a list of factors set by regulation at 8 C.F.R. § 1003.18(c)(3). They include why closure is sought, why it is opposed, how likely the person is to succeed on the outside petition, how long closure would last and the likely end of the case.

The Board’s earlier decision in Matter of Avetisyan, 25 I&N Dec. 688 (BIA 2012), had supplied a similar list. The path since has not been straight: The Attorney General overruled Avetisyan in 2018, and a later Attorney General restored its standard in 2021 while rulemaking proceeded. Cahuec Tzalam said the regulations had superseded it, and spent a long footnote explaining why it thinks Avetisyan went wrong. Before Avetisyan, both parties had to agree to closure. Since 2012, by the Board’s count, closures have risen from about 3,400 a year to about 15,000, and the median closed case sits for more than 4,000 days.

From Matter of B-N-K-, decided five months earlier, the Board took two working rules. No single factor is dispositive, but “whether there are persuasive reasons for a case to proceed and be resolved on the merits is the primary consideration.” And when closure is meant to wait out something happening elsewhere, there must be “some foreseeable resolution to the ongoing proceedings within a reasonably short period of time.”

The receipt proved only that a petition existed

SIJ turns on a state court order. Under the regulation the Board walked through, the order must come from a court with jurisdiction over juvenile dependency or custody. It must declare the young person dependent on the court or place the young person in the custody of a state agency or a court-appointed person or entity. It must find that reunification with one or both parents is not viable because of abuse, abandonment, neglect or a similar basis under state law. And a determination must exist that returning to the home country would not be in the young person’s best interest.

A receipt shows none of that. It was the only evidence the young man offered, and without the order the Board had “no way of knowing” whether he was subject to one that met those requirements. So he had not shown a likelihood of success on the petition. That absence, it said, “strongly militates against a grant of administrative closure.”

This part of the decision is easy to act on. If an order exists, it can be filed. The opinion does not say whether this young man had one. It says only that he did not submit one. In California, the state-court side of this process has its own rules; our Bianka M. analysis explains one of them.

Even a winner would have waited years

The Board could have stopped there. It did not. Even if he had proved eligibility, it wrote, the wait “also strongly militates against administrative closure.”

Approval of a SIJ petition does not make someone a permanent resident. It allows an application to adjust status, “only when an immigrant visa is immediately available.” SIJ visas come out of the fourth employment-based preference category, and your place in that line is your filing date, called a priority date. His was April 23, 2025. Under the State Department’s October 2025 visa bulletin, visas were then available to people who had filed before July 1, 2020.

The Board found that “nearly 5-year gap” enough to rule out a reasonably short wait. It was “not realistic” to expect him to become eligible within a “reasonably short period of time.” DHS’s interest in finishing the case, the Board added, was persuasive.

The strongest answer to this reasoning is that the line moves. Visa dates do advance. By the Board’s own later citation, the date had reached July 15, 2021, by March 2026, more than a year of movement in about five months. But the Board answered that in its later decision. Dates can retrogress, meaning move backward when demand exceeds supply, so the wait is “highly uncertain.” Uncertainty counts against the applicant.

Four months later, an approved petition fared no better

A person with an approved petition has the very thing this young man lacked. In Matter of Pinzon Rozo, 29 I&N Dec. 507 (BIA Mar. 11, 2026), that was not enough either.

The man was from Colombia and had overstayed a visitor visa from 2018. Shortly after turning 20, he filed a SIJ petition on May 23, 2025. USCIS approved it on November 4. He conceded he was removable and said he would file no application for relief in immigration court. The judge refused closure but continued the case until February 12, 2027.

The Board reversed that too, under a different rule. A continuance requires good cause, and the test from Matter of L-A-B-R-, 27 I&N Dec. 405 (A.G. 2018), looks mainly at how likely the outside relief is and whether it would change the outcome. The Board accepted that he would be eligible if a visa were available and that adjustment would change the outcome. He still lost on what it called secondary factors: the “nearly 4-year gap,” DHS’s opposition and diligence. He had been here since 2018 and “has not offered any explanation” for waiting until 2025 to file.

Together, the two decisions leave little room when the priority date is years away. A receipt alone did not support closure, and an approved petition did not support a continuance where the visa wait was long and uncertain. What the Board keeps asking is how soon a visa will actually be available.

What the classification does and does not do

A footnote states the point flatly: SIJ classification “would not by itself confer any lawful status” or affect removability. For the removability point it cited the Third Circuit’s decision in Cortez-Amador v. Attorney General, 66 F.4th 429 (3d Cir. 2023). For the status point it relied on Murillo-Chavez v. Bondi, 128 F.4th 1076 (9th Cir. 2025), where the Ninth Circuit held that a man was not “admitted” when he was granted SIJ parole, only later when he became a permanent resident. In California, that is circuit law on what counts as an admission.

The classification still carries real weight. Approved petitioners are treated as paroled for adjustment purposes and are spared many grounds of inadmissibility under section 245(h) of the immigration statute. Those benefits matter when a visa arrives.

Deferred action has been a separate track. USCIS rescinded its program for young people with SIJ classification in June 2025. A federal court in New York stayed the rescission on November 19, 2025, in A.C.R. v. Noem, 809 F. Supp. 3d 103 (E.D.N.Y. 2025), finding it likely arbitrary and capricious. As of that order, USCIS had to adjudicate deferred action and work permits under its 2022 policy, though without any presumption in favor of granting them and without deadlines. The court barred removal only of the named individual plaintiffs and reserved class certification.

What goes back to the immigration judge

The order vacates the closure, reinstates the removal case and remands it. The only issue on appeal was closure. The SIJ petition stays with USCIS, and the removal case goes back before the immigration judge.

The Board also left a warning for later cases. Its footnote says that long closures “could raise serious legal issues as an infringement on DHS’ legal authority” and said the parties were free to address that “legal tension” on remand.

If you have a SIJ petition and a removal case

• File the juvenile court order, not just the receipt. The Board called the order “particularly important.” Attach it to any request for closure and to any motion to continue.
• Do the visa math on the record. Compare your priority date with the current bulletin, and explain why the visa is close if it is. A remote date is now the main obstacle.
• Explain any delay in filing. Pinzon Rozo counted years of unexplained waiting against the applicant.
• Do not rest on the petition alone. The man in Pinzon Rozo conceded removability and sought no relief in court, and the Board relied on that. If you have asylum or another claim, present it.
• Answer an appeal. The Board invited briefing here and heard only from DHS. If DHS appeals a closure in your case, get help and respond.
• Ask about DHS’s position before you file. DHS’s objection weighed against both applicants, and closure or a continuance over objection is what these decisions restrict.

Later developments. These came after this analysis’s March 22, 2026 date. On June 22, 2026, a federal court in Texas entered a consent judgment in Texas v. Department of Justice, No. 7:26-CV-00070-O, ECF 5 (N.D. Tex. June 22, 2026). It declared the 2024 Administrative Closure Rule, the source of the factors the Board applied here, “in excess of statutory authority and contrary to law.” It declared that “no statute authorizes immigration judges to indefinitely administratively close or suspend adjudication of a case before them.” It vacated the rule, permanently barred the government from enforcing it, and barred new regulations letting immigration judges close removal cases without reaching the merits absent an express statutory basis. The judgment does not mention cases already closed or the other regulations that separately authorize or require closure in certain circumstances, which 8 C.F.R. § 1003.18(c)(1) listed. The same court later refused to let three cities and a legal services group intervene (ECF 23, Aug. 21, 2026) and denied them a stay (ECF 30, Sept. 2, 2026). That leaves a real gap: Cahuec Tzalam treated the regulation as replacing Avetisyan, and the Attorney General’s 2021 decision restoring Avetisyan applied only while rulemaking proceeded. Treat administrative closure as uncertain, and expect a continuance under 8 C.F.R. § 1003.29, the route in Pinzon Rozo, to matter more. That route is narrow as well. Matter of L. Ramirez, 30 I&N Dec. 157 (BIA Oct. 16, 2026), told immigration judges to apply the L-A-B-R- balancing test to continuances based on a pending visa petition or a future visa, “keeping in mind the importance of the secondary factors and that good cause does not exist if visa availability is remote.”