High Court Finalizes End of Biden-Era Deportation Pause Rule

The Supreme Court allowed an agreement between the state of Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice to take effect on Tuesday. The decision formally ends a Biden-era immigration rule that had governed how judges could temporarily pause deportation proceedings. The court acted with no noted dissents, leaving a lower court ruling in place that eliminated the regulation.

The Biden administration adopted the rule in 2024. It set out specific guidelines for immigration judges to use administrative closure. This practice allowed judges to put certain deportation cases on hold while migrants pursued other immigration relief through federal proceedings. With the rule now gone, that specific procedure for pausing cases has been removed from the regulatory framework.

Texas initiated the legal challenge in June. The state argued that the federal government adopted the rule without proper legal authority. The Department of Justice joined the lawsuit on the side of Texas. Federal lawyers asked the judge to vacate the rule and to prevent similar regulations from being adopted in the future.

U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, granted that request on the same day the Justice Department made it. Opponents of the rule accused the two parties of working together to eliminate the regulation, despite being formally on opposite sides of the lawsuit.

In August, three cities with large immigrant populations, Baltimore, Maryland, New Haven, Connecticut, and Columbus, Ohio, joined the advocacy group Centro Legal de la Raza in an attempt to intervene. They sought to defend the rule on appeal. The cities argued that eliminating the procedure could lead to deportations, which would reduce local tax revenues and provide them with legal standing to challenge the agreement. Judge O'Connor rejected that argument.

On Oct. 9, the cities and the advocacy group asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block the lower court's judgment while their appeal proceeded. They accused Texas and the federal government of engaging in egregious collusion to end the rule. Federal lawyers countered that the challengers lacked standing because they had not shown a concrete injury required by federal law. The Supreme Court's decision leaves the rule eliminated while the dispute over the process continues.