This article examines the interaction between immigration law and administrative law. Scholars and courts regularly treat immigration as outside of, or exceptional to, the normal operation of administrative law and its norms of judicial review. Yet in the past decade, the Roberts Court has radically reshaped administrative law. This broader administrative law project has largely emphasized the primacy of the federal courts and judicial review, enlarging the putative rights of regulated parties, at the cost of agency power. Within that project, immigration adjudication is a frequent conversation partner. Immigration adjudication is used to undermine the administrative state’s claim to policymaking legitimacy and to reinforce the role of courts in other substantive areas. At the same time, the Roberts Court has largely excluded noncitizens from the benefits of a new, robust role for the courts. Noncitizens in removal proceedings thus appear as useful subjects throughout the Roberts Court’s administrative law jurisprudence, incorporated into administrative law where convenient but largely excluded from the field’s reach where it might actually matter.

Building on this understanding of the uses of immigration within administrative law, I argue that exceptionalism is the wrong framework to understand judicial review of immigration adjudication. Instead, I argue that immigration adjudication suffers from what I label an uneven incorporation of administrative law norms. That is: immigration adjudication has incorporated the bureaucratic functioning enabled by administrative law, but without the robust harmonizing functions and transubstantive access to judicial review, with attendant cross-doctrinal standards of review.

This article, therefore, makes three contributions. First, it develops the concept of immigration law’s uneven incorporation of administrative law’s norms and doctrines. Doing so allows for a more accurate and nuanced understanding than an exceptionalism framework, as well as an opening for noncitizens to utilize administrative law’s toolkit to challenge the arbitrary decision-making of removal proceedings and enforcement. Second, the article offers the first examination of the Roberts Court’s use of immigration adjudication within its larger administrative law project. Finally, the article uses immigration law as a lens to view administrative law writ large. Immigration adjudication offers one vision of what administrative law might look like in decades to come: increasingly context-specific doctrines, standards of review, and requirements for specific agencies. This would be a major shift in administrative law, retreating from transubstantive standards of judicial review dating back at least to the New Deal; it would also undermine administrative law’s uniformity and harmonizing function, long seen as a primary justification of the field as a whole.

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