Three US cities — Baltimore in Maryland, Columbus in Ohio and New Haven in Connecticut — together with the Oakland, California legal-services group Centro Legal de la Raza, have asked the US Supreme Court to halt a Texas court judgment that eliminated a federal immigration-court rule nationwide, Democracy Forward, which represents the applicants, announced. The emergency application, filed on October 9 and addressed to Justice Samuel Alito, who handles Fifth Circuit emergency matters, asks the court to stay the judgment while the cities' appeal proceeds. According to reporting summarised by the Texian Partisan, Justice Alito has ordered a response by 4 p.m. Eastern on October 22.

At issue is administrative closure — a longstanding practice, codified in a May 2024 Executive Office for Immigration Review rule ('Efficient Case and Docket Management in Immigration Proceedings,' effective July 29, 2024), that lets an immigration judge temporarily pause a deportation case while the person pursues lawful relief through US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The applicants say the pause matters most for survivors of violent crime, human-trafficking victims, and abused or neglected children seeking protection — including U-visa applicants whose cooperation local police rely on to solve crimes. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said his city's police department certified eligibility for 36 U visas last year.

Texas sued over the rule in the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas in June 2026. The Justice Department did not defend its own regulation: its immigration-court office's acting director, Sirce Owen, had already written that the office could not defend the rule in good faith, and, in the applicants' account, the department announced in advance it would not defend it. Hours after Texas filed, the state and the department jointly asked for a consent judgment, and Chief US District Judge Reed O'Connor entered it the same day, June 22, 2026 — declaring that no statute authorises immigration judges to indefinitely close cases, vacating the rule nationwide and permanently barring a similar rule without an express basis in law. The cities sought to intervene to defend the rule; the district court denied them, and the Fifth Circuit declined on September 29 to pause the judgment.

The cities allege — their word is 'egregious collusion' — that the government 'did not merely leverage a convenient loss to undo agency action, but rather, announced in advance that it would not defend a disfavoured regulation and then colluded with the challenger from the moment that suit was filed,' erasing the rule 'without meaningful judicial review, public participation, or adherence to the [Administrative Procedure Act's] rulemaking requirements.' The Justice Department denies collusion: in a September filing to the Fifth Circuit it argued it 'cannot be required to defend a rule it believes is unlawful, and it must follow any orders courts entered against it,' and Owen's memo called past use of administrative closure 'an unmitigated disaster from a policy standpoint' that 'strongly appears to have also been unlawful.' Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein said letting judges keep discretion 'protects due process' and helps crime victims and witnesses cooperate with law enforcement; Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman said no administration should be allowed to 'manufacture a legal defeat' to rewrite policy behind closed doors. The case is City of Baltimore v. Texas (Texas v. US Department of Justice, No. 7:26-cv-00070-O). For Punjabi and other immigrant families in the US whose cases sit paused in immigration court while a visa or protection claim is decided elsewhere, whether the Supreme Court freezes the Texas judgment will decide if that pause survives. (Sources: Democracy Forward press release, October 2026; Washington Sun reporting on the application, October 15, 2026; Texian Partisan, October 2026.)