Immigration Judges Ordered to Limit Continuances: What to Do If Your Green Card or Visa Is Pending

Last Updated: September 2026

You have an approved petition sitting at USCIS and a hearing date a few weeks out. For years, that approval was the reason a judge would grant a continuance in immigration court and agree to wait.

On September 4, 2026, The Guardian reported that immigration judges had been trained to cut that time short, including in cases where waiting would let someone receive a visa or a green card they have already been approved for.

Two things are being blurred together in the coverage, and separating them changes what you should do. The training is not a law or a regulation, and its materials have not been made public. What is public, binding, and very recent is a line of decisions from the Board of Immigration Appeals issued between February and April of 2026. Those are the decisions a judge will actually cite in your hearing.

The headline is scarier than the change. What decides these cases is not an internal training slide. It is a short list of details you can prepare before you walk into the courtroom, and this article walks through them.

What changed in September, and what did not

Start with what did not change. No new regulation was published in September 2026, and the legal standard for asking a judge for time is the same one that applied a year ago.

What was reported is an internal Department of Justice training session for immigration judges called “Motions to Continue: Efficiently Advancing Cases to Completion.” According to The Guardian, the session pushed judges to restrict continuances even where additional time would allow someone to obtain legal protection, and it specifically discussed abused or abandoned children and survivors of violent crime. The same reporting indicates judges were discouraged from allowing more than ten days to find a lawyer.

None of that has been published as a rule, and the training materials are not publicly available. In April 2026 the American Immigration Council filed a public records request seeking immigration judge training materials, and as of today they remain unavailable.

The real shift happened earlier, and somewhere else: in the published decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the administrative court that reviews what immigration judges do. Between February and April 2026, the BIA issued three decisions that made it more difficult in some cases to keep removal proceedings on hold. Those decisions can directly affect how a judge evaluates a request for more time.

What a continuance in immigration court is, and what “good cause” means

A continuance postpones your hearing to a later date. It does not give you immigration status or resolve your case. It simply gives you more time.

The rule fits in one sentence. Under 8 CFR 1003.29, an immigration judge “may grant a motion for continuance for good cause shown.” A motion is a formal request made to the judge, either in writing or in the hearing itself.

That same regulation sets one outer limit worth knowing: a continuance cannot push the adjudication of an asylum application past 180 days absent exceptional circumstances.

One detail organizes everything that follows. The burden of showing good cause is yours, not the government’s. A judge does not have to justify denying you time. You have to justify receiving it. That is why preparation carries as much weight here as the law does.

The two primary factors, and the four secondary ones

When good cause rests on something pending at another agency, such as a petition at USCIS, judges apply a framework set out in 2018 in a decision known as Matter of L-A-B-R-.

The judge must focus principally on two factors:

How likely you are to receive the collateral benefit.
Whether that benefit would materially affect the outcome of your removal case.

The judge must also weigh four secondary factors:

Whether you exercised reasonable diligence in pursuing that benefit.
The Department of Homeland Security’s position on your request.
The length of the continuance you are asking for.
The procedural history of the case, meaning how many times it has already been reset.

Here is the piece most coverage leaves out, and it is the part that decides real cases. Even if the two primary factors support your request, the judge must still consider the secondary factors. The Board said so in Matter of L-N-Y- in 2020, and it applied that rule in 2026.

In practical terms: you can be entirely right on the merits, plainly eligible for the benefit, and still lose the continuance because of when you filed, how often your case has been reset, or the fact that the government objected.

What Matter of Pinzon Rozo actually held

This is the decision judges have been citing since March, and it is being described inaccurately.

Matter of Pinzon Rozo, 29 I&N Dec. 507, decided March 11, 2026, involved a young Colombian man who entered on a visitor visa in 2018 and overstayed. In May 2025, shortly after turning twenty, he filed for special immigrant juvenile classification, the category for children abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent. USCIS approved it in November 2025. The judge continued his case to February 2027, and the government appealed.

The Board reversed. That is the headline. The reasoning says something quite different.

The Board found both primary factors satisfied. It expressly acknowledged that he would be eligible to adjust status if a visa were available, and that this would materially affect the outcome of his case. That is not what he lost on.

He lost on three secondary factors:

The priority date gap. Your priority date is your place in the visa line, and it is the day you filed your petition. His was May 2025, and at the time visas were only available to people who had filed before July 2021. Nearly four years of uncertain waiting.
A failure to show diligence. He entered in 2018 and did not file until 2025, with no explanation offered for the delay.
The government’s opposition, combined with the fact that he had conceded removability, meaning he agreed he was deportable, and had filed no application for relief with the judge at all.

That produces an honest reading of the case. It is not that approved petitions stopped working. An approved petition never carried a case on its own, and the Board has been saying so since 1982. The 2026 decision shows how important the secondary factors can be. Unlike your priority date, some of those factors may be strengthened through careful preparation.

How these decisions may affect different immigration cases

The answer turns on one question: whether you have to wait in the visa line.

If you are waiting on a priority date, this case law reaches you directly. That covers children with special immigrant juvenile petitions and relatives in preference categories, such as siblings or adult children of citizens. One September 2026 data point cuts in your favor here: the employment-based fourth preference, where special immigrant juvenile petitions are classified, moved forward to December 15, 2022 for final action, with a single date covering all countries. That movement is an argument. If your priority date is closer to becoming current than the one in Pinzon Rozo, your case is distinguishable, and that has to be put in writing in front of the judge.

If you have a U visa petition pending, you keep an argument of your own. A 2012 decision, Matter of Sanchez-Sosa, held that a U visa petition that is approvable on its face, what lawyers call prima facie approvable, ordinarily warrants a continuance for a reasonable period. In February 2026, in Matter of Ibarra-Vega, the Board narrowed its reach in the administrative closure context, citing today’s volume of pending petitions, but it did not overrule it. It remains good law and your attorney can cite it.

If you are an immediate relative of a U.S. citizen, the logic of Pinzon Rozo does not reach you the same way. Spouses, parents, and unmarried minor children of citizens do not wait in line, because a visa is always available to them. Because visas are immediately available in these categories, the long wait for a priority date that affected Pinzon Rozo generally does not apply. There is also a path many people do not know about: under 8 CFR 1245.2, the immigration judge has exclusive jurisdiction over an adjustment application filed by someone already in removal proceedings. In other words, you may not need a continuance at all, because you can sometimes apply for your green card in front of the judge.

Much the same is true of VAWA self-petitioners who are immediate relatives of a citizen abuser.

Ten days to find a lawyer is a floor, not a ceiling

There is a misunderstanding here that can cost you your case, and it is worth undoing carefully.

The statute says this. Under section 239(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, your hearing cannot be scheduled earlier than ten days after you are served with the Notice to Appear, the document that formally begins your removal case. Only you can give up that period, and only in writing.

Read it once more, because the operative word is “earlier.” Ten days is the statutory minimum you are guaranteed, not the maximum a judge is allowed to give you. Nothing in the statute requires a judge to stop there. The continuance regulation lets a judge grant more time for good cause, and that authority is untouched.

The reported training may encourage judges to limit additional time, but the statute itself does not establish ten days as the maximum.

If you arrive at your master calendar hearing without counsel and the judge offers ten days, you can ask for more and explain why: which offices you have called, which pro bono lists you have contacted, which documents you are still gathering. The same statute that sets those ten days requires the government to maintain current lists of free legal service providers. Asking for time with specific, documented reasons is a different request than asking for time in the abstract.

What to bring to your next hearing

The difference between a continuance granted and one denied usually sits in the folder, not in the argument.

A USCIS receipt notice, standing alone, is precisely the kind of showing the Board found insufficient in 2026. What strengthens a request for time, according to the practice guidance the Immigrant Legal Resource Center published in May 2026, is a record that answers the secondary factors before the judge raises them:

Evidence that your case is moving, not merely that it exists: USCIS notices, responses to requests for evidence, any recent activity.
Official processing times for your case type, printed and dated, so the judge can see your wait has a horizon rather than being open-ended.
Evidence of prima facie eligibility: a bona fide determination, a grant of deferred action, which is a decision by the government not to pursue your removal for now, waitlist placement, or the signed law enforcement certification in U visa cases.
A documented explanation of your diligence, meaning why you filed when you filed. If there was a reason, and there nearly always is, it needs to be in the record. For young people, who rarely know these categories exist and depend on an adult to reach a lawyer, that argument carries real force.
The difficulty or impossibility of pursuing your case from outside the United States, where that applies.

Depending on the case, an attorney may consider requesting a continuance, administrative closure, or termination, and may raise more than one option when legally appropriate. Administrative closure parks the case off the active docket, while termination ends it outright. Even if the judge grants only one, having raised all three preserves the issues for a possible appeal.

If the judge denies the continuance

It is not the end of the road, but the map of exits changed this year and the details matter.

Administrative closure is no longer the fallback it once was. Closing a case administratively means taking it off the active docket without resolving it, leaving it paused indefinitely. In Matter of Ibarra-Vega, 29 I&N Dec. 476, decided February 27, 2026, the Board held three things: that closure over the government’s objection is inappropriate where no visa is available and the record does not show one is likely in the reasonably near future; that the “reasonably short period of time” standard governs both closing a case and recalendaring it; and that closure cannot serve as a de facto form of relief invented outside the statute. In the body of that decision it added a practical rule: absent unique circumstances, administrative closure lasting more than six months is presumptively unreasonable.

Two weeks later, in Matter of Medina Madrid, 29 I&N Dec. 514, decided March 13, 2026, the Board held that a case closed for more than thirteen years had to be recalendared, and that an intention to file a provisional unlawful presence waiver did not justify keeping it on hold.

In April, in Matter of Santiago-Santiago, 29 I&N Dec. 589, decided April 24, 2026, it held that a judge cannot terminate proceedings based on a grant of deferred action, DACA in that case, without first weighing the reasons behind the government’s opposition.

What that leaves you, in practical terms:

Applying for your green card before the judge, if you are in a category where a visa is available.
Filing whatever relief applications exist in your case, such as asylum or cancellation of removal, rather than waiting solely on the USCIS process. Having a live application in front of the judge changes the analysis, because it was precisely the absence of one that weighed against the respondent in Pinzon Rozo.
Preserving the issue for appeal. A denied continuance is reviewable, and the route runs through an appeal to the Board and, where available, to the federal courts. To appeal something, you first have to have asked for it properly.

If your case is heard at the Northern Virginia immigration court in Annandale, it also helps to understand how that courtroom runs and what happens between the Notice to Appear and an appeal.

Every case is different, and the legal landscape in this area continues to shift.

Immigration deadlines can be short

Do you know how much time you have left to act?

In immigration matters, deadlines are strict and rarely extended, and missing one can permanently remove options that were available to you. Building a strong case also takes time: gathering evidence, preparing documents, and reviewing your history. That means the real window to act is always shorter than the deadline itself.

Speak with an attorney (703) 549-5445 WhatsApp

Attorneys Khalid Shekib & Daniela Lucena · Alexandria, VA

Frequently asked questions

Can I be deported even though my petition was approved?

Yes, that is legally possible, and it is what happened in Pinzon Rozo. An approved USCIS petition does not stop a removal case on its own while no visa is available. What can stop it is eligibility for relief before the judge, or a continuance supported by a showing of good cause. That is why filing everything you are eligible for matters more than relying on the approval alone.

My hearing is in two weeks and I have no lawyer. Does the judge have to give me time?

The statute guarantees that your first hearing will not be scheduled earlier than ten days after you were served with the Notice to Appear. That is the minimum. A judge may grant more time for good cause, and you can request it by explaining the specific steps you have taken to find representation. You are not required to waive that period, and any waiver has to be in writing.

Is it worth bringing my receipt notice?

It is worth bringing, but it rarely carries the request by itself. In 2026 the Board found a record containing little more than a receipt to be insufficient. What adds weight is proof that your case is progressing, official processing times, any favorable determination you already hold, and a documented explanation of why you filed when you did.

Does administrative closure still exist?

It exists, but it has become considerably harder to obtain and to keep. Since February 2026 the Board presumes that closure lasting more than six months is unreasonable absent unique circumstances, and it will not sustain closure over the government’s objection where a visa is not expected in the reasonably near future. Whether administrative closure should be requested depends on the facts and legal options in your case.

If the judge denies my continuance, is that the end?

Not necessarily. The denial can be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals and, after that, to a federal court of appeals. For an appeal to have something to review, the request has to have been made properly and the supporting documents have to be in the record. That is a concrete reason to build the motion carefully even when the odds look difficult.

What is still within your control before the hearing

It is discouraging to learn from a news story that your window is narrowing just as your petition was finally moving.

Hold on to what is accurate. The regulation did not change, the good cause standard is intact, and the judge still has the authority to give you time. What changed is how much weight diligence, documentation, and your filing date now carry. Those are record items, and a record gets built before you enter the courtroom.

At Law Group International, deportation defense is a central part of our practice, and continuance motions are daily work in the Northern Virginia court. Attorneys Khalid Shekib and Daniela Lucena represent families in removal proceedings across Virginia, Washington D.C., and Maryland, in English and in Spanish.

If you have a hearing on the calendar and a petition pending, the useful conversation is the one you have now, while there is still time to gather what the judge will ask for. An approved petition can still be important, but the judge may need more than the approval itself when deciding whether to give you additional time.

Ready to prepare your case with an experienced immigration team?

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Khalid Shekib & Daniela Lucena · Law Group International

Alexandria, VA · Virginia, DC & Maryland

(703) 549-5445 WhatsApp

This article provides general information and does not constitute legal advice. Every immigration case is different, and the law may change. For guidance on your situation, consult a licensed immigration attorney.

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