Supreme Court Leaves the Texas-Won Ruling in Place Barring Immigration Judges From Pausing Deportation Cases
The justices on Tuesday refused an emergency request to restore 'administrative closure,' the decades-old practice ended by a same-day deal between Texas and the Trump administration in a Wichita Falls courtroom.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to reinstate the authority of immigration judges to temporarily postpone deportation cases, keeping in place an agreement between President Donald Trump's administration and Texas that bars the once-common practice known as administrative closure, Reuters reported. The justices denied an emergency request by three U.S. cities, including Baltimore, and an immigrant legal advocacy group to halt the deal while litigation continues.
The court's decision came as a brief, one-sentence order with no explanation, as is common on emergency requests, and no justice publicly dissented, Reuters reported. The challengers — Baltimore, New Haven and Columbus, along with the Oakland legal-aid organization Centro Legal de la Raza — say the federal government improperly colluded with Texas to secure the rule's invalidation.
The dispute traces to June 22, when Texas sued in federal court in Wichita Falls to challenge the Biden-era rule codifying administrative closure, the Justice Department agreed the same day that the rule was unlawful, and U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor approved the agreement the same day, according to Reuters and Texas Tribune reporting summarized in Wednesday's state file. Immigration judges had used administrative closure for decades to clear cases off their active dockets while a separate proceeding — a visa petition or an appeal of a criminal conviction, for example — was pending.
In a statement carried by Reuters, the challengers and their lawyers at Democracy Forward said eliminating the practice "puts vulnerable people at greater risk of deportation and undermines public safety in communities across the country," and called the sequence "a dangerous abuse of the judicial process." Representatives of the Justice Department and the Texas attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters reported. Government statistics cited in coverage of the ruling put the number of immigrants who received administrative closure between 1990 and 2026 at about 360,000.
