The Supreme Court keeps the ban on shelving deportation cases while the lawsuit over it continues

One sentence from the Supreme Court on Tuesday kept hundreds of thousands of deportation cases moving.

The justices denied an emergency request from Baltimore, New Haven and Columbus, and from the legal services group Centro Legal de la Raza, to put administrative closure back in place while the cities appeal. Administrative closure let immigration judges take a case off the active docket and leave it there, often because something else that could decide the person's future was still pending, a visa petition or an appeal of a criminal conviction. Judges used the tool for decades, and it has been applied in hundreds of thousands of cases over the years.

The practice ended in a single day. On June 22, Texas sued to challenge the procedure in federal court in Texas, and the administration filed an agreement the same day giving Texas what it asked for. A federal judge approved the agreement the same day. The cities say that sequence is the point. They argue the Justice Department worked with Texas to erase a federal rule without proposing a change or taking public comment, the steps the law usually requires. "Rather than follow the law and allow the public to be heard, the Department of Justice colluded with Texas to erase longstanding immigration procedures in a single day, putting families, survivors of violence, and entire communities at risk," said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, which represents the challengers.

Texas and the administration make the opposite case. They say administrative closure worked in practice like an amnesty, letting people who lack legal status remain in the United States indefinitely with their cases parked and no decision ever made. Ending it fits the administration's wider push to move deportation cases to outcomes. The Justice Department and the Texas attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Tuesday's order decides nothing for good. Emergency orders carry no reasoning, and the appeal underneath it continues in the lower courts. What it settles is the position while that fight runs. The cases stay on the docket, the judges cannot park them, and every person whose case sat closed for years now waits for a hearing date instead of an indefinite pause.