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As legal challenges to the Trump administration mount, the justices are facing a key test — a flood of “emergency applications” asking for immediate intervention.
- April 10, 2025, 12:54 p.m. ET
The Trump administration has in recent weeks asked the Supreme Court to allow it to end birthright citizenship, to freeze more than a billion dollars in foreign aid and to permit the deportation of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process.
In each case, the administration told the justices the request was an emergency.
By filing so-called emergency applications, the administration has asked for immediate intervention from the nation’s highest court 10 times so far — more than the total number of such requests during the 16 years of the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Trump administration lawyers have repeatedly told the justices their intercession is necessary to quickly undo the decisions of lower court judges who have imposed temporary pauses on large swaths of President Trump’s agenda.
The Supreme Court has in recent years heard about 60 to 80 traditional “merits” cases each term. These cases often arrive at the court only after months or years of consideration by lower courts. The justices do not issue opinions until after reading extensive briefs, listening to oral arguments and meeting to discuss and exchanging multiple drafts of decisions.
But an emergency application is fast-tracked, with rulings expected within days or weeks of filing after limited briefing and no arguments. Traditionally reserved for clearly urgent matters — most often requests for stays of execution for people sentenced to death — they are now the favored path to challenge so-called nationwide injunctions, where a single federal judge issues a ruling that affects not only the parties to a case but the entire nation.
Critics say emergency applications, also known as “the shadow docket,” force the justices to consider cases of enormous consequence — abortion rights, Covid-19 mandates and environmental regulations — quickly and without a fully developed record from lower courts. The applications now make up a significant amount of the justices’ workload, crowding their other cases.
For a court whose work is already veiled in secrecy, the emergency docket adds another layer of mystery because the court releases little information about its deliberative process on the applications, and the rulings often do not include the court’s reasoning or even a vote count.
