Democrats running three blue cities begged the Supreme Court to stop Donald Trump from restarting stalled deportation cases.
Their lawyers cried collusion and warned of dire consequences.
And Joe Biden handed Trump the winning move years before anyone filed a word.
The Justices Slammed the Door on Biden’s Pause Button
The Supreme Court refused to rescue a Biden-era immigration rule that let judges shove deportation cases onto a back shelf. Not one justice noted a dissent.
The practice carries a sleepy bureaucratic name, administrative closure. An immigration judge pulls a case off the active calendar without ever deciding it, the illegal alien walks out of the courtroom, and the clock just stops.
Trump’s first-term Justice Department shut that door. Biden’s team pried it back open, and in 2024 his administration wrote the practice into a formal federal regulation, the kind of paperwork that makes life miserable for whoever comes next.
But Texas sued in June, arguing the Biden administration never had the legal authority to write the rule in the first place.
And then the Trump Justice Department did something that sent the Left into a tizzy. It agreed with Texas. Federal lawyers asked the court to wipe out the rule and to bar the agency from cooking up a copycat version down the road.
US District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W Bush appointee, granted the request the same day.
Three cities with large immigrant populations, Baltimore, New Haven, and Columbus, teamed up in August with an immigrant legal advocacy group called Centro Legal de la Raza and tried to barge into the case to defend the rule on appeal. O’Connor turned them away. The Fifth Circuit refused to freeze his judgment.
So the coalition headed to the Supreme Court in October and accused Texas and the administration of “egregious collusion.” The cities also branded the whole case “manufactured litigation.”
Solicitor General D John Sauer fired back that the cities hadn’t shown the kind of concrete injury a party needs before a federal court will even hear it out. The justices sided with him in a single sentence.
The Harm Blue Cities Named Was Their Own Budget
Now look at the injury those cities actually claimed. They told the courts that killing the rule could get their residents deported, and deported residents stop paying local taxes.
Three Democrat-run cities marched up to the highest court in the land and argued, more or less, that they needed illegal aliens to stay put because the city treasury counts on them.
So much for the tear-jerker. When the lawyers had to name a real-world harm, they didn’t lead with families or fairness. They led with the cash register.
But nobody filed a brief for the American worker in Columbus or Baltimore who competes with that cheap labor every single morning. Those folks don’t get a legal advocacy group. They just get the bill.
Texas put the stakes more bluntly. The state told the justices the Biden rule let immigration judges “effectively grant indefinite amnesty” to people living in the country illegally.
A Temporary Pause That Outlasted Four Presidents
And the numbers back Texas up.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review counted 309,677 administratively closed cases sitting in immigration courts and at the Board of Immigration Appeals as of the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The tally stood at 389,076 at the end of fiscal 2024.
The average closed case had sat untouched for 6,929 days. Do the math, and that comes out to roughly 19 years.
Defenders like to call it a temporary pause. A pause that has outlasted four different Presidents stretches the word “temporary” about as far as it can go.
Lynn Damiano Pearson, director of legal strategy at Centro Legal de la Raza, said in a statement that the decision would bring “dire consequences for immigrants, their families, and their communities.”
But American voters already weighed those consequences. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in February 2026 found 61 percent of Americans support deporting illegal aliens, including 35 percent of Democrats.
Donald Trump ran on mass deportations in 2024 and won. Stuffing hundreds of thousands of cases into a drawer for two decades amounts to vetoing that mandate quietly, one docket at a time.
Joe Biden Wrote the Playbook These Cities Suddenly Hate
The cities’ lawyers left one inconvenient chapter out of their outrage.
In March 2021, the Biden administration announced it would stop defending Trump’s public charge rule, the policy that screened out green card applicants likely to lean on welfare. Within hours, federal lawyers dropped their appeals and let a lower-court ruling striking down the rule stand.
Republican-led states tried to step in and defend it. The courts shut them out. The Ninth Circuit said the states waited too long, and the Seventh Circuit turned away a group of states led by Texas, of all places.
The Supreme Court tossed the states’ appeal in June 2022. Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, voiced concern about “whether the Government’s actions, all told, comport with the principles of administrative law.”
Nobody in a blue-city law office hollered collusion back then. San Francisco sat on the winning side of that very case.
And Texas, the state now wearing the black hat, spent that whole fight on the outside looking in.
Roberts’ 2022 worry hasn’t gone anywhere, and the cities leaned on it hard. Maybe some of the justices still share it. But four years ago the Court let Biden’s version of the shortcut stand, and this time not one of them, the Chief Justice included, noted a dissent.
The Next Round Moves to Friendlier Courtrooms
The order doesn’t settle the merits. The cities’ appeal still sits at the Fifth Circuit, and it turns on whether they belong in the case at all. They’ve lost that argument at every stop so far.
Federal lawyers even sketched a road for the other side. They told the justices that an individual illegal alien who gets denied closure might be able to attack the judgment directly, since that person has a more direct stake than a city government does. Translation: expect a fresh wave of one-off petitions, quite possibly filed in appeals courts a long way from Texas.
Democrats and their allies spent four years treating immigration court like a waiting room with no exit. Trump wants it working like a courtroom again, with cases that actually end.
And the pressure on that system keeps building. A federal appeals court ruled separately and recently that illegal aliens aren’t entitled to bond hearings.
But the pause button is gone for now. And the cities that fought to save it never quite explained why any case should need two decades to reach a decision.
The average case they fought to keep frozen has gathered dust for 6,929 days. Plenty of first-time voters weren’t born yet when a typical one of those files went on the shelf.
Sources:
Fox News, “Trump’s unusual legal gambit against Biden-era deportation rule pays off at Supreme Court”
Reuters via US News & World Report, “US Supreme Court Denies Immigration Judges the Power to Shelve Deportation Cases”
Newsweek, “Supreme Court Allows Trump to Undo Major Biden-Era Immigration Policy”
Immigration Analytics, “Administrative Closure: Supreme Court Refuses to Revive Rule”
The New Republic, “Supreme Court Strips Judges of Power to Pause Trump Deportations”
Supreme Court of the United States, City of Baltimore, Maryland v. Texas, No. 26A500, stay application
SCOTUSblog, “Litigation continues over public charge immigration rule”
Legal Information Institute, Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco case preview
Roll Call, “Supreme Court ends challenge over public charge rule”
The Daily Signal, “Most Americans Back Trump’s Deportation Goals, Reuters/Ipsos Poll Finds”