BREAKING
The Supreme Court just barred immigration judges from pausing deportation cases. Immigrants waiting on visa petitions or protection claims can no longer have their cases set aside while they wait.
The Supreme Court's order on Tuesday was one sentence long. Unsigned. No explanation, and no noted dissents.
That pause is called administrative closure. Judges used it to set a deportation case aside while something else played out: a visa petition, an appeal of a criminal conviction, a crime victim seeking protection, a child who had been abused or abandoned. Past data shows most immigrants whose cases came back to court after a closure were ultimately allowed to stay.
Trump's first administration claimed judges had no authority to do it. Biden restored it with a rule in 2024.
On June 22, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued to kill that rule, claiming it let judges "effectively grant indefinite amnesty." Within hours, Trump's Justice Department, which runs the immigration courts, joined Texas in asking the judge to throw the rule out. It also asked him to forbid any similar rule in the future.
Reed O'Connor, the only federal judge in Wichita Falls, granted all of it the same day. Permanently. Nationwide.
America First Legal, the group Stephen Miller founded, co-filed the Texas lawsuit.
Baltimore, New Haven and Columbus, along with the immigrant legal aid group Centro Legal de la Raza, tried to step in and defend the rule since nobody else would. O'Connor said they had no standing and rejected the cities' argument that they'd lose taxpayers to deportation. The 5th Circuit refused to intervene.
At the Supreme Court, their lawyers called the deal "egregious collusion." They said the government announced it wouldn't defend the rule "and then colluded with the challenger from the moment that suit was filed."
Their attorney, Joshua Salzman of Democracy Forward, warned that if this stands, any agency can wipe out a rule it doesn't like just by refusing to defend it and immediately agreeing to a nationwide ruling against it.
Paxton and the Justice Department ran the same play last year. The DOJ sued Texas over in-state college tuition for undocumented students, Texas asked O'Connor to strike its own law down just hours later, and he did.
