On May 14, 2026, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction blocking four provisions of Texas Senate Bill 4 (S.B. 4, 88-4), one day before the 2023 statute was scheduled to take effect on May 15, 2026.
On May 15, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced that April 2026 marked the twelfth consecutive month in which the United States Border Patrol released zero apprehended noncitizens into the interior of the United States from the southwest border.
For most of the modern history of the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), lawful permanent residence has functioned as a settled status. Adjudication was, in practical effect, terminal: once an applicant adjusted status under INA § 245, 8 U.S.C. § 1255, or was admitted as an immigrant abroad, the resulting green card was treated as a durable entitlement that could be undone only through narrow and well-defined procedures.
On May 12, 2026, Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Todd M. Lyons convened a press conference to announce the findings of an enforcement initiative directed at the F-1 student Optional Practical Training (OPT) program.
Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g), authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to enter into written agreements that delegate specified federal immigration enforcement functions to state and local law enforcement officers, who act under the direction and supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On June 12, 2026, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas announced that federal prosecutors had filed 254 new immigration and immigration related criminal cases over the week running from June 5 through June 11, 2026.
As the Supreme Court works through the final weeks of October Term 2025, a cluster of immigration cases remains undecided, and rulings are expected before the Court rises for its summer recess. Taken together, the pending cases reach further into the architecture of immigration law than any single term has in years.
On Thursday, May 14, 2026, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced the “No Safe Haven for Terrorist Families Act,” a bill that would establish an entirely new ground of inadmissibility and deportability under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) for certain close relatives of persons designated as foreign terrorists or otherwise identified as hostile foreign actors.
On May 11, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published an interim final rule (IFR) titled Signatures on Immigration Benefit Requests in the Federal Register. The rule, which becomes effective on July 10, 2026, amends 8 C.F.R. § 103.2(a)(7)(ii)(A) to give U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adjudicators explicit discretionary authority to either reject or deny a benefit request that the agency later determines was filed without a valid signature, even where the filing cleared intake at the USCIS Lockbox.
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