Abstract: This Article argues that administrative adjudication is more vulnerable to agency-head intervention than is often assumed. When administrative hierarchy binds frontline decision-makers immediately, but judicial review is deferred and geographically fragmented, agency-head decisions can reshape outcomes before courts have a meaningful opportunity to respond.
The Article examines that dynamic in the immigration courts, where the Attorney General may certify cases for review and issue precedential decisions that bind immigration judges nationwide. Immigration judges are hierarchically bound by agency precedent, while judicial review is available only through petitions for review from final orders of removal and proceeds separately across the regional courts of appeals. The result is a temporal and geographic mismatch: executive intervention moves immediately through a nationally dispersed adjudicatory system, while appellate review arrives later, case by case and circuit by circuit.
Using the Attorney General’s 2018 decision in Matter of A-B- I as a case study, and drawing on publicly available Executive Office for Immigration Review data, this Article shows that asylum grant rates across federal circuits rapidly converged after the decision, compressing long-standing geographic disparities in outcomes. It describes this dynamic as an executive pinch: a form of apex executive control that temporarily compresses variation by binding geographically dispersed adjudicators before reviewing courts can respond. That convergence weakened over time as litigants contested Matter of A-B- I and the courts of appeals later reentered the field along divergent doctrinal paths. But even temporary compression had significant consequences: Matter of A-B- I resulted in a substantial number of removal orders for asylum seekers who might otherwise have obtained protection.
The Article’s broader contribution is an institutional account of executive power in administrative adjudication. It shows that judicial review, as structured by jurisdiction-channeling rules that delay and fragment review across the courts of appeals, is a weak real-time constraint when hierarchical intervention is immediate and binding. The Article thus offers a framework for understanding how adjudicatory design allocates power, structures frontline decisionmaking, and shapes legal outcomes in the interval before courts can effectively intervene. In immigration adjudication, that temporal gap has immediate consequences for asylum seekers’ access to protection, heightening the stakes of when—and not just whether—judicial review is available.
