A week before the midterms, the Supreme Court handed President Trump a win on deportations.
On Tuesday, the justices refused to revive a Biden-era rule that let immigration judges put deportation cases on ice, sometimes for years. The order was one sentence long, and not a single justice publicly dissented.
The practice is called "administrative closure." It sounds like paperwork, and that's the point. A judge could take a deportation case off the active docket without ever deciding it. Nobody was ordered removed and nobody's case was denied. The case just sat there, and the person in it stayed in the country.
It added up fast. According to the Trump administration, cases that were closed but never decided grew from about 172,000 in 2013 to more than 268,000 in 2017.
Trump's first administration shut the practice down in 2018. The Biden administration brought it back and, in 2024, wrote it into federal rules.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued, calling it "de facto amnesty." The Trump administration agreed. The Justice Department had already said it "could not — and will not — defend" Biden's rule, so Texas and the federal government settled the case the same day, and a federal judge signed off.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, three Democratic-run cities, Baltimore, New Haven, and Columbus, tried to undo the deal, along with a California immigrant legal group.
Their arguments didn't get far. They claimed Texas and the Trump administration had colluded because they were on the same side. They said they'd lose tax revenue if illegal immigrants living in their cities got deported. They warned that crime victims might stop cooperating with police if their deportation cases started moving again.
One court after another turned them away. A federal judge ruled the cities didn't even have standing to challenge the deal. The 5th Circuit refused to block it. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did the same.
Under the ruling, deportation cases have to stay on the docket until a judge decides them. Either a person has a legal right to be in the country or they don't, and the judge has to say which.
Voters sent Trump back to the White House to enforce immigration law. At the peak, more than 268,000 deportation cases were sitting on the shelf, and judges can no longer put them there.
