What Options Are Available to Stop or Delay Deportation in Court?

Relief That Can End the Case Permanently

These are the forms of relief that, if granted, resolve the removal case entirely, typically by granting lawful status or protection from removal.

Asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture remain the primary options for anyone with a fear of returning to their home country. Asylum requires a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Withholding of removal and CAT protection have higher evidentiary standards but don't carry a one-year filing deadline the way asylum does. All three have become harder to win at the earliest stage of a case following a 2025 trilogy of BIA decisions that lets immigration judges dismiss weak claims without a full hearing, discussed in more detail below.

Cancellation of removal for lawful permanent residents, under INA § 240A(a), can restore status for a green card holder facing removal, generally requiring at least five years as an LPR, seven years of continuous residence after a lawful admission, and no aggravated felony conviction.

Cancellation of removal for non-permanent residents, under INA § 240A(b), is available to people without a green card who have been continuously physically present in the United States for at least 10 years, have good moral character during that period, have no disqualifying convictions, and can show that their removal would cause exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to a spouse, parent, or child who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. This is a genuinely difficult standard to meet, and it recently got harder. In Matter of Arevalo-Vargas, 29 I&N Dec. 519 (BIA 2026), the Board reversed a grant of cancellation where the immigration judge had found hardship to the respondent's U.S. citizen children, holding that because cancellation of removal is a continuing application, a child who turns 21 while the case is still on appeal stops being a qualifying relative altogether, even if the hardship finding was correct when the immigration judge made it. The Board also reinforced that ordinary economic and educational setbacks, on their own, do not rise to the level this standard requires. Cases involving children close to turning 21 now carry real timing risk that didn't exist the same way before this decision.

Adjustment of status, most often through marriage to a U.S. citizen or an approved family or employment petition, can be pursued directly in front of an immigration judge in many cases, ending the removal case by granting lawful permanent residence instead.

VAWA self-petitions allow a spouse, child, or parent who has been abused by a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident family member to self-petition for status independent of the abuser, and this relief can be pursued while removal proceedings are pending.

U visas and T visas provide status for victims of certain crimes or human trafficking who cooperate with law enforcement. Because USCIS, not the immigration court, adjudicates these petitions, a pending U or T visa application is often paired with a request to continue or administratively close the removal case while it's processed.

Waivers of inadmissibility, including the I-601 and the provisional I-601A, don't grant status by themselves but can remove a specific bar, such as unlawful presence or certain criminal or fraud grounds, that would otherwise block someone from qualifying for one of the relief options above.

Voluntary departure, under INA § 240B, doesn't grant status, but it ends the case without a formal removal order. Someone who receives voluntary departure and actually leaves within the required period avoids the harsher immigration consequences that come with a removal order, including a bar on certain future relief and, in some cases, a longer reentry bar. It comes with strict deadlines and, for departure granted before the case concludes, often a bond requirement, and it is generally not available to someone with a disqualifying criminal record.

Options That Delay the Case Without Ending It

These tools don't resolve the underlying removal case, but they buy time, sometimes to build a stronger case for relief, sometimes to wait out a separate process that could change the outcome entirely.

Continuances, governed by 8 CFR § 1003.29, require the requesting party to show "good cause." Immigration judges weigh how likely a related pending matter, such as a family petition at USCIS, is to be approved, and how much that would affect the case, a standard drawn from Matter of L-A-B-R-, 27 I&N Dec. 405 (A.G. 2018). A specific, documented reason for the request matters far more than a general request for more time.

Administrative closure temporarily removes a case from the active docket without terminating it, effectively pausing everything. This authority has gone through real turbulence. Matter of Castro-Tum, 27 I&N Dec. 271 (A.G. 2018), eliminated it almost entirely. Matter of Cruz-Valdez, 28 I&N Dec. 326 (A.G. 2021), restored it. A 2024 federal regulation then codified explicit authority for immigration judges and the Board to administratively close cases, along with a presumption in favor of closure when both sides jointly request it. The authority is technically still on the books, but in April 2025 the Department of Justice rescinded internal guidance that had supported broader use of it, and practitioners have reported immigration judges granting it far less readily since then, even though nothing in the underlying regulation actually changed.

Motions to reopen and motions to reconsider ask the immigration judge to revisit a decision already made, based on new facts or a legal error, and can pause enforcement of an order while pending in certain circumstances, including motions based on lack of notice of an in absentia hearing.

Appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals automatically stay removal while the appeal is pending, under 8 CFR § 1003.6. A March 2026 rule attempted to shorten the standard appeal deadline and impose an automatic default dismissal framework, but a federal court blocked those specific provisions the day before they were set to take effect, leaving the 30-day filing deadline and traditional summary dismissal standards in place. Other changes from that rule, including a simultaneous briefing schedule, did take effect and remain in force.

Petitions for review filed in a federal circuit court, after the BIA issues a final decision, don't automatically stay removal the way a BIA appeal does, but a separately filed motion for a stay of removal can accomplish the same result while the circuit court considers the case.

Prosecutorial discretion and deferred action, requested directly from ICE rather than the immigration court, can pause removal for someone who isn't a current enforcement priority, though this is entirely discretionary on the government's part and isn't a right that can be litigated the way court-based relief can.

Termination of Proceedings: A Narrower Path Than It Used to Be

A motion to terminate asks the judge to end the case outright because the government hasn't established a basis to proceed at all, for example where DHS can't establish removability, where the person has already become a U.S. citizen, or where an approved I-130 or VAWA petition eliminates removability entirely.

For years, a favorite version of this motion involved challenging a Notice to Appear that omitted the specific time or date of the first hearing, an issue that reached the Supreme Court in Niz-Chavez v. Garland. That path has narrowed substantially. In Matter of Fernandes, 28 I&N Dec. 605 (BIA 2022), the Board held that this kind of defect is a claim-processing issue, not a jurisdictional one, and that an objection has to be raised before the close of pleadings to matter at all. Then, in Matter of Lopez-Ticas, 29 I&N Dec. 90 (BIA 2025), the Board went further, holding that DHS can simply cure a defective NTA by asking the immigration judge to amend it with the correct hearing information, rather than the case being terminated outright, and applied the Fernandes timing rule retroactively so that older, previously forfeited objections can't be revived. The practical result is that a missing time or date on an NTA, once a genuinely useful way to end a case early, is now, in most circumstances, a fixable clerical problem rather than grounds for termination.

The Broader BIA Trend Worth Understanding

Several of the changes described above point in the same direction. Matter of Arevalo-Vargas narrowed non-LPR cancellation. Matter of Lopez-Ticas narrowed NTA-based termination. And, separately, a 2025 trilogy of decisions, Matter of H-A-A-V-, Matter of C-I-G-M- & L-V-S-G-, and Matter of T-A-G-, gave immigration judges much broader authority to pretermit asylum claims without a full hearing when the facts, even taken as true, don't establish eligibility. None of these decisions eliminated the underlying forms of relief. What they did, consistently, was tighten the procedural and evidentiary room available to win them, which means the quality and specificity of what gets filed, whether it's a hardship argument, an NTA objection, or an asylum application, matters more now than it did even two years ago.

Putting This Together

The right combination of these tools depends entirely on the specific facts of the case: what relief someone might actually be eligible for, whether a related application is realistically going to be approved, how strong the underlying record is, and how much time is genuinely needed versus how much a court is likely to grant. Someone with a strong marriage-based adjustment case needs a very different strategy than someone whose best option is a continuance while a U visa petition works its way through USCIS. Given how much several of these standards have tightened in just the past year, an outdated understanding of what used to work is often more dangerous than not knowing the options at all.

If you're facing removal proceedings and want to understand which of these options actually apply to your situation, contact the Law Offices of Shawn S. Sedaghat at (818) 382-3333.

This article discusses general legal principles and does not describe any specific client or matter. Nothing here constitutes legal advice or creates an attorney-client relationship. Eligibility requirements and BIA precedent in this area change frequently; confirm current requirements before relying on this article.

Shawn S. Sedaghat is an immigration attorney at Law Offices of Shawn S. Sedaghat focused on deportation defense, immigration appeals, asylum, family-based immigration, and employment-based immigration. He is the firm's founder and principal attorney and has more than 30 years of experience handling U.S. immigration matters.