Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to restore immigration judges' power to temporarily pause deportation cases, leaving in place an agreement between President Donald Trump's administration and the Republican-led state of Texas that ended the practice known as administrative closure.
The justices turned away an emergency request from three cities — Baltimore, Maryland; New Haven, Connecticut; and Columbus, Ohio — and a legal services provider, Centro Legal de la Raza, who had asked the court to put a Biden-era regulation back into effect while their challenge continues. The court's order was a brief, unsigned one-sentence decision with no explanation and no justice publicly dissenting, as is common for emergency requests.
What administrative closure did
Administrative closure allowed immigration judges to suspend deportation proceedings in certain situations, such as when the person facing removal was separately seeking legal protection — for example, as a neglected child or a survivor of a violent crime — or had a visa petition or an appeal pending that could change the outcome. Judges had used the tool for decades to manage crowded dockets and to avoid removing people whose cases were not yet ready to decide.
According to the Trump administration, the number of removal cases closed this way rose from nearly 172,000 in 2013 to more than 268,000 in 2017. Critics of the practice, including Texas and the Trump administration, have argued it let people without legal status remain in the United States indefinitely, acting in effect like an amnesty. Supporters say it promoted efficiency and protected due process rights, and that its loss could affect hundreds of thousands of cases.
The deal the challengers call collusion
The dispute turns on how the regulation was erased. Texas sued the federal government to challenge the rule on June 22. The Justice Department immediately agreed that a judge should set it aside and bar future administrations from adopting anything similar unless Congress changed the law, and U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor signed off on the settlement the same day in Wichita Falls, Texas.
The cities and the legal services group, represented by Democracy Forward, called that sequence "egregious collusion" — a friendly lawsuit used to repeal a regulation without the public notice-and-comment process normally required. "Rather than follow the law and allow the public to be heard, the Department of Justice colluded with Texas to erase longstanding immigration procedures in a single day, putting families, survivors of violence, and entire communities at risk," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward.
When the challengers asked the Texas judge to let them defend the policy because the federal government would not, the judge said they lacked a legal right to get involved. The Justice Department argued to the Supreme Court that, because of that ruling, the challengers could not ask the justices to intervene before it is potentially overturned on appeal.
What the ruling does — and does not — decide
Tuesday's order is an interim decision, not a final ruling on whether the Texas settlement was lawful. It means the settlement stays in force for now while the challengers pursue their appeal at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court did not explain its reasoning, and it did not rule on the underlying claim that the administration bypassed federal rulemaking law.
The decision is nonetheless a significant win for the administration's hardline immigration approach, which has sought to remove procedural pauses in deportation cases. During the first Trump administration, the attorney general had already found that immigration judges lacked authority to indefinitely suspend proceedings through administrative closure; a 2024 Justice Department rule restored the discretion, and the Texas settlement removed it again.
For immigrants in pending proceedings, the practical effect is immediate: judges cannot use administrative closure to hold a case while a separate claim for protection or legal status is resolved. Whether that changes again will depend on the appeal — and on whether Congress ever writes the procedure into law itself.
Sources: Reuters (one-sentence order, no dissents, June 22 filing, O'Connor sign-off, decades of use, hundreds of thousands of cases); Bloomberg Law (challengers' "egregious collusion" argument, 5th Circuit appeal, neglected-child and violent-crime-survivor examples); USA Today (cities and Centro Legal de la Raza, standing argument, Perryman quote); FXNews24 (172,000-to-268,000 figures, first-term attorney general finding, 2024 rule). The "collusion" characterization is attributed to the challengers; the administration disputes that it acted improperly, and the court gave no reasoning.