Major shadow docket rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court during the second Trump administration (2025– )

From the first day of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump’s second term (January 20, 2025), the Supreme Court has issued a record number of substantive shadow docket rulings, many in response to emergency applications from the Trump administration concerning legal challenges to its controversial orders, acts, or policies. By early February 2026, the Court had issued 29 Trump-related decisions, the vast majority of which sided with the Trump administration.

Below is a list of major Supreme Court shadow docket rulings issued in response to emergency applications filed by or directed at Donald Trump or departments, agencies, or officials of the second Trump administration. Additional Trump-related applications have yet to be answered by the Court.

• March 5, 2025: In Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Supreme Court denied a request by the State Department to vacate a federal district court’s order requiring the government to pay about $2 billion to independent organizations for foreign development aid assistance completed before February 13, 2025.
• April 4, 2025: In Department of Education v. California, the Supreme Court granted a request by the Department of Education to vacate a federal district court’s order requiring the reinstatement of millions of dollars in education-related grants.
• April 8, 2025: In Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees, the Supreme Court granted a request by the Office of Personnel Management to stay a federal district court’s order requiring the government to permit the reinstatement of some 16,000 federal employees who had been laid off.
• April 27, 2025: In Trump v. J.G.G., the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to vacate a federal district court’s order temporarily prohibiting the immediate deportation of alleged foreign gang members under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
• May 6, 2025: In United States v. Shilling, the Supreme Court granted a request by the Trump administration to stay a federal district court’s order preventing the enforcement of a Defense Department policy that would disqualify persons with gender dysphoria—a distressed state arising from conflict between a person’s gender identity and the sex the person was identified as having at birth—from serving in the U.S. military.
• May 19, 2025: In Noem v. National TPS Alliance, the Supreme Court granted a request by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to stay a federal district court’s order postponing Noem’s termination of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of Venezuelan immigrants granted and extended under the Joe Biden administration.
• May 22, 2025: In Trump v. Wilcox, the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to stay a federal district court’s orders restoring Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris to the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, respectively.
• May 30, 2025: In Noem v. Doe, the Supreme Court granted a request by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to stay a federal district court’s order preventing the termination of alien parole programs under which more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela had become legal residents in the United States.
• June 6, 2025: In Social Security Administration v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Supreme Court granted a request by the solicitor general of the United States on behalf of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to stay a federal district court’s order requiring the SSA to prevent investigators in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing information in the SSA’s record systems.
• June 23, 2025: In Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., the Supreme Court granted a request by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stay a federal district court’s preliminary injunction prohibiting the DHS from deporting noncitizens to “third countries” (countries other than the noncitizens’ home countries or countries of origin) without first notifying them of the country to which they might be deported; allowing them to challenge their deportations; and determining the fear of persecution or torture in the country to be “unreasonable.” The shadow docket ruling thus allowed the DHS to continue deporting noncitizens to unidentified third countries, as long as the torture they feared was relatively unlikely. Notably, torture in a given country may be relatively unlikely but still quite reasonably feared.
• June 27, 2025: In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to stay a federal district court’s order imposing a nationwide injunction against Trump’s January 20 executive order ending birthright citizenship. The Court’s ruling did not address the constitutionality of Trump’s order but only the question of whether federal district courts are capable of issuing nationwide injunctions.
• July 8, 2025: In Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees, the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to stay a federal district court’s nationwide injunction against Trump’s June 2 executive order requiring departments and agencies in the executive branch to formulate plans for significant reductions in the federal workforce.
• July 14, 2025: In McMahon v. New York, the Supreme Court granted a request by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to stay a federal district court’s order requiring the Department of Education to reinstate 1,378 employees fired under the department’s plan to limit personnel to those necessary to perform legally mandated tasks.
• July 23, 2025: In Trump v. Boyle, the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to stay a federal district court’s order requiring the reinstatement of three members of the officially independent Consumer Product Safety Commission who had been fired without cause by Trump.
• September 8, 2025: In Noem v. Perdomo, the Supreme Court granted a request by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to stay a federal district court’s order preventing federal immigration officers in Southern California from identifying (and detaining) potential undocumented immigrants on the basis of “apparent race or ethnicity,” “speaking in Spanish or accented English,” “presence at a location where illegal aliens are known to gather,” and “working or appearing to work in a particular type of job.”
• September 10, 2025: In South Carolina v. Doe, the Supreme Court denied a request by the state of South Carolina to stay an order issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that required a public school in the state to allow a transgender student to use boys’ bathrooms pending a challenge to the state’s law limiting students to school bathrooms matching their biological sex at birth.
• September 22, 2025: In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to stay a ruling by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia requiring the Trump administration to reinstate a member of the Federal Trade Commission whom Trump had fired in March of that year.
• October 3, 2025: In Noem v. National TPS Alliance, the Supreme Court granted a request by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to stay a federal district court’s order preventing her from terminating the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Venezuelan immigrants, which had been extended by Pres. Joe Biden in 2023.
• November 6, 2025: In Trump v. Orr, the Supreme Court granted a request by Trump to stay a federal district court’s order requiring that passports issued by the State Department indicate the gender identity of passport holders rather than their biological sex at birth. Thus, under the district court’s order, a passport held by a transgender woman would list her sex as “female” rather than “male.”
• December 4, 2025: In Abbot v. League of United Latin American Citizens, the Supreme Court granted a request by the governor of Texas to stay a federal district court’s order prohibiting the state from using its new congressional map in the 2026 midterm elections.
• December 23, 2025: In Trump v. Illinois, the Supreme Court denied a request by Trump to stay a federal district court’s order preventing the Trump administration from federalizing National Guard troops and deploying them in Illinois “to respond to violent efforts to obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.”
• February 4, 2026: In Tangipa v. Newsom, the Supreme Court denied a request by a group of California Republicans to delay a federal district court’s order allowing California to use its new congressional map in the 2026 midterm elections.
• February 26, 2026: In Mirabelli v. Bonta, the Supreme Court granted a request by a group of parents in California to vacate an order issued by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that stayed a decision by a federal district court preventing enforcement of state policies requiring teachers to address students with their preferred names and pronouns and to inform parents of such gender-transition behavior only with students’ consent. In the same shadow docket ruling the Court denied a similar request by California teachers.
• April 6, 2026: In Stephen K. Bannon v. United States, the Supreme Court granted a request by the Trump administration to vacate and remand a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld the conviction of Pres. Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon on charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena requiring that he testify before a House committee investigating the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack. The Supreme Court’s decision promised to effectively erase Bannon’s conviction.
• May 14, 2026: In Danco Laboratories, LLC v. Louisiana, the Court granted a request by a manufacturer of RU-486 (also known as mifepristone), a synthetic steroid drug prescribed for inducing abortion during the early weeks of pregnancy, to stay an order by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that would have temporarily prevented patients in Louisiana from receiving RU-486 by mail based on telehealth examinations while the drug’s accessibility was challenged by Louisiana in a federal district court. In a major decision issued in 2024, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to measures by the FDA that had expanded accessibility to the drug in 2016 and 2020.
• August 24, 2026: In Donald J. Trump v. California, et al. and Alabama, et al. v. California, et al., the Supreme Court voided one of two injunctions issued by a Massachusetts district court that enjoined provisions of Trump’s Executive Order 14399, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections. Trump’s order called upon the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to send to each state, at least 60 days before a federal election, a list of persons who are or will be qualified to vote. Other elements of the order required the United States Postal Service (USPS) to develop a “rule” that would (1) establish a specific design for ballot envelopes, (2) allow states to provide the USPS with a list of people who will receive mail-in ballots, (3) send to each state a list of individuals who are “enrolled” with the USPS for mail-in or absentee ballots, and (4) prevent the postal delivery of mail-in ballots from individuals who are not on the USPS enrollment list for that state. The district court held that, because the plaintiffs in the first case—23 states and the District of Columbia Circuit—were likely to succeed in showing that the order was unconstitutional, the provisions should be stayed. In its shadow docket decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority found that the suit filed in the district court by the 23 states and D.C. was “not justiciable,” because the challenged provisions of Trump’s order were either harmless to the states or had not yet harmed them—because the USPS had not yet developed a final rule for performing the actions required in Trump’s executive order. In a signed dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, argued that the district court’s stay of Trump’s order should be permitted, because “the respondent States face a…concrete and imminent injury” in violation of the Constitution’s elections clause (Article III, Section 4), which states in part that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also wrote a dissenting opinion. The district court then lifted both of its injunctions. Interestingly, the USPS issued its final rule three days before the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s first injunction. On that basis the district court issued a two-week stay of relevant provisions of Trump’s executive order on the ground that the final rule cited in the Supreme Court’s stay now exists and the rule’s enforcement would greatly damage the upcoming midterm elections. One week later, Trump asked the Supreme Court to freeze the district court’s stay; on the following day, the district court issued an injunction indefinitely blocking enforcement of Trump’s order; and two days later Trump asked the Court to block the district court’s latest order. On September 14, the Court issued an unsigned order denying Trump’s request, noting that “the Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction.”
• August 31, 2026: In National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Supreme Court overturned an appeals court ruling that had upheld a district court’s preliminary injunction halting the reconstruction of the East Wing of the White House, which Trump had begun in the fall of 2025. After initially staying the district court’s injunction while it considered arguments from both sides, an appeals court affirmed the injunction in early August 2026. Because the appeals court’s earlier stay was scheduled to end later in the month, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to issue an administrative stay of the injunction pending its own review. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. issued the requested stay, and the Court completed its review on August 31. In a 5–4 vote, the Court stayed the district court’s injunction, finding that the government was likely to prevail in the court’s final ruling. Notably, it did not hold that Trump’s reconstruction of the White House is legal, but only that the case would ultimately be dismissed because the plaintiff lacks standing to sue. Interestingly, the largely conservative Chief Justice Roberts wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion, joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, in which he argued that Trump’s reconstruction is likely illegal and that the National Trust does indeed have standing to sue.
• September 25, 2026: In Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters, the Supreme Court stayed another district court ruling regarding Trump’s Executive Order 14399, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections. Citing the order’s provision requiring the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to send to each state a list of persons who are or will be qualified to vote, the lower court held that, by making accessible to states data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), the DHS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) program, and “other relevant Federal databases,” the government would violate the Social Security Act and federal privacy laws. In an apparent 6–3 vote, the Court granted the Trump administration’s application for a stay of the lower court’s ruling, finding that privacy laws and the Social Security Act would not be endangered under Trump’s order. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Jackson, joined by justices Sotomayor and Kagan, argued that the order should have been stayed because the “modified SAVE system” would likely disenfranchise or at least burden registered voters.
• September 29, 2026: In Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., the Supreme Court granted a request by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stay a district court order permanently blocking third-country deportations as currently conducted. The order was issued by the same court that had earlier enjoined deportations without proper notifications and reasonable assessments of the risk of torture. As part of its shadow docket ruling, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the district court case from which the temporary and permanent orders were issued, scheduling oral arguments for early December 2026.
• October 21, 2026: In Trump v. Kingdom, the Court denied a request by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to stay a preliminary injunction issued by a federal court in the District of Columbia Circuit that prevented the BOP from blocking gender-affirming medical care for transgender inmates until the court reached a decision in the case. The BOP’s restrictions would prevent prisoners from receiving gender modification surgeries, hormone therapies, and “social accommodations” consistent with their gender identities. The BOP’s policies were designed to enforce Trump’s Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, which required the attorney general “to ensure that…no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” (See Major Executive Orders Issued by U.S. Pres. Donald Trump During His Second Term of Office [2025– ].)
• October 27, 2026: In City of Baltimore, Maryland v. Texas, the Court denied a request by three cities, including Baltimore, to stay a joint decision by a district court in Texas and the Department of Justice (DOJ) that had eliminated the power of immigration judges to put deportation proceedings on hold under certain circumstances. Such a power had been granted in 2024, the last full year of Pres. Joe Biden’s term, under a regulation issued in the DOJ by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). The holding power was then challenged in federal district court by Texas, in State of Texas v. United States Department of Justice. Remarkably, the DOJ almost immediately asked the court to rule in favor of Texas and to find the holding power illegal under any regulation. Three cities, including Baltimore, then asked to join an appeal of the case in support of the holding power, claiming that they had “substantial interests” in its preservation (because they would lose many of their taxpayers). After the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied the cities’ request to stay the joint decision, the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to stay the district court’s decision. Soon afterward, the Court issued an unsigned shadow docket ruling against the cities.
• November 2, 2026: In United States v. California, the Court denied a request by the Justice Department to order the state of California to delay the counting of approximately 20,000 mail-in ballots in the midterm elections of 2026, scheduled for November 3, pending the verification of the voters’ American citizenship, which the Trump administration had argued was uncertain. More specifically, the Justice Department requested that the Court temporarily stay an order by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that refused to stay a federal district court order denying the Trump administration’s request to delay the counting of ballots by suspected noncitizens.