The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to halt a lower court’s June ruling that blocked a Biden administration immigration rule allowing judges to close deportation proceedings indefinitely, after the Trump administration opted not to defend the rule.
The high court denied the emergency petition by a coalition of Democrat-run cities seeking to stop the lower court’s ruling with no elaboration and no noted dissent. The case began earlier this year when Texas officials sued the federal government over the rule, and the Department of Justice agreed with the state that the Biden-era rule should be set aside. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, a nominee of former President George W. Bush, entered a final consent judgment tossing the rule, leading a group of Democratic cities, led by Baltimore, to attempt to intervene in the lawsuit to defend it.
Texas and opponents of the rule argued that the expanded ability for judges to close cases without resolution gave illegal immigrants a way to avoid removal indefinitely. The Democratic coalition argued that the DOJ’s refusal to defend the rule unlawfully circumvents the review process that is part of rescinding federal rules, and warned that it could open the door to similar deals to quickly undo rules any administration does not like.
“As long as this judgment serves as a viable template, this Court’s holding that agencies must ‘use the same procedures when they amend or repeal a rule as they used to issue the rule in the first instance’ will be effectively a dead letter,” the emergency petition from the coalition of Democratic cities said. “And given agency incentives, such collusive suits will surely proliferate further.”
The DOJ argued to the justices that the ruling should not be disturbed because the group of cities lacked standing to intervene, with Solicitor General D. John Sauer writing that “objections about the merits of a consent judgment are no substitute for the threshold prerequisites of Article III standing.”
The Supreme Court ultimately denied the emergency application but did not explain why it rejected the last-ditch bid to halt the ruling.
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The Biden-era rule struck down by the district court expanded immigration judges’ administrative authority to close deportation proceedings, removing those cases from the judges’ dockets without resolving whether people are removable from the United States.
The ruling is the latest win in an immigration case at the Supreme Court for the Trump administration, which will have two major immigration cases on the high court’s merits docket in the coming months. The Supreme Court will look at the legality of the administration’s policy of deporting illegal immigrants to “third countries,” which are countries other than their country of origin, and the administration’s mandatory detention policy for illegal immigrants.