Three months after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Venezuelans to lose temporary protected status in May 2025 — even as litigation over the policy change's legality wended through the courts — Walkelis Finol was sent to Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. After four months in detention, she was deported, with only her cellphone and the clothes on her back.

Finol had been in the U.S. since 2022, and enjoyed legal status under TPS, which gives nationals of countries that are unsafe to return to the ability to work and live here. She'd emigrated, she told Law360, because her family often faced threats and extortion in Venezuela after her brother quit his government job. Finol's husband came to the U.S. first and she joined him a few months later. They soon built a life in Texas, where they were raising their young son.

But in the early days of the second Trump administration, then-U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced she would revoke an extension of the TPS designation for some Venezuelans, terminating their legal status in April 2025. A group of TPS holders sued, and won a preliminary relief, with a district court pausing the change in status. The Ninth Circuit upheld the decision.

The government then used a procedural move that was once rare, but has become common practice for the Trump administration: It filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court.

In May 2025 the government argued that, if the justices didn't revoke TPS immediately, it would suffer irreparable harm — an injury that can't later be remedied unless a court steps in and provides short-term relief — to "national security and public safety." The high court stayed the trial judge's order, ending TPS for many Venezuelans. The one-paragraph order did not explain the justices' reasoning, but it left hundreds of thousands of people in limbo and some, like Finol, have been deported.

In fact, about 30,000 Venezuelans have been deported since President Donald Trump returned for a second term in January 2025, according to Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus. She estimates about half of them were TPS holders whose status ended with the Supreme Court's emergency docket decision.

Although TPS status is still being litigated on the merits, the emergency order that upended Finol's life was one of 21 such interim orders blessing executive policy since Trump's return to office in 2025. That marks an explosion in the use of the emergency docket, which Trump has utilized more than any other president, with a strong success rate.

Emergency applications are decided on a truncated briefing schedule, usually without oral argument or much explanation in the decisions — a phenomenon that has earned them the nickname "the shadow docket." While emergency rulings often rankle the court's liberal minority who've described it as rushed and "unreasoned," conservative justices have defended their emergency rulings as stop-gap measures. But people at the center of those cases who've lost their legal status, their jobs, or federal funding say even interim decisions can upend their lives.

"You're seeing effects being produced by these orders that are often irrevocable," said Georgetown University Law Center professor Stephen Vladeck, who literally wrote the book on them in "The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic."

"Whether it's people changing their livelihoods because they can't serve in the military or work for the Department of Education anymore, or the court letting the president refuse to spend $4 billion mandatory for aid spending … even if the cases make it back [on the merits], that doesn't undo the effects of the rulings," he said.

For Finol, who'd grown accustomed to life on the outskirts of Dallas, the "culture shock" of suddenly returning to rural Venezuela — where there are no big grocery stores and utilities are spotty — was "inexplicable." Her deportation was also hard on the family she left behind. She wants to bring her child — a U.S. citizen who's been diagnosed with autism — to live with her, but the legal process for doing so is difficult. Her husband can't work or even cook because he must care for their toddler, who clings to him and cries.

"[Children that age] are just so little. They need someone to feed them, to take them to the bathroom, to do everything for them," she told Law360 through an interpreter. "He waited for me to get home every day, and he would cry. I don't think he understood what was happening or where his mom was or why."

'An Interim Call'

For much of the court's history, the emergency docket was used for extremely time-sensitive matters, like deciding whether to halt executions, or whether states could move forward with new voting laws in the weeks before elections.

But as Trump changed federal policy at breakneck speed, he faced an onslaught of legal challenges, and his administration has run to the Supreme Court to reverse its lower court losses.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in an email told Law360 the president was "implementing the America First initiatives on which he was elected on."

"President Trump has faced a historically unprecedented number of injunctions by liberal lower court judges, the same judges who would rather push their own policy schemes and undermine the administration's lawful agenda," she said in a statement.

Most of the cases in which Trump sought emergency relief from the high court were first decided by district court judges who were appointed by Democrats, but at least three adverse lower court rulings came from Republican district court appointees.

The executive branch traditionally has filed emergency applications sparingly. During the eight-year presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, their administrations filed five and three such petitions, respectively. During Trump's first term, he filed 40 emergency applications. President Joe Biden also filed more than the historical average, with 19 such petitions in four years. But just a year-and-a-half into his second term, Trump has filed 34 emergency applications, according to a Law360 review of data compiled by Vladeck and the Brennan Center for Justice, which found the president prevailed in 78% of the cases that have been decided.

Vladeck said the Trump administration's aggressive agenda has sparked an unprecedented amount of litigation, but he added that the shadow docket was already gaining traction in the late 2010s, because Congress was "sitting on the sidelines," and presidents of both parties chose to pursue their agendas by executive orders, which are more vulnerable to litigation than statutes.

And the court has rewarded emergency petitions by granting many of them.

"The justices have basically effectively reduced the threshold for emergency relief, especially in cases in which they're sympathetic to the applicant on the merits," Vladeck said.

Facing criticism that they are prematurely siding with the administration before the merits have been argued, members of the court's conservative wing have tried to allay those attacks by stressing that even if their interim relief decisions are proliferating, they are temporary.

Justice Samuel Alito bristled at the negative connotations of the term "shadow docket" in a 2021 speech in which he contended the rulings do not "definitively decide important issues." On a recent book tour, Justice Amy Coney Barrett described emergency rulings as "kind of a 'for now.'"

"This isn't the final resolution, this is just an interim call," she said during an interview at the National Constitution Center. "This just says for now, during the interim, while this case is being litigated, this regulation should have effect."

But even temporary orders can have permanent implications.

One decision, described as a "preliminary view" by its unnamed authors, led to the lapse of $4 billion in federal funding that would have helped aid groups fight diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV, according to Mitchell Warren, executive director of AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, one of the plaintiffs in that case.

Congress had appropriated that money as part of a larger foreign aid package that had to be used by the end of the 2025 fiscal year. When Trump took office, he froze the funding, and eventually sought to claw back about $4 billion using the Impoundment Control Act. AVAC won a preliminary injunction in the trial court, but when the administration filed an emergency application, the Supreme Court stayed it pending an intermediate appeal.

The court provided a brief explanation, saying the government had "made a sufficient showing" that the Impoundment Control Act precluded the lawsuit. It also noted the decision "should not be read as a final determination on the merits," adding, "The relief granted by the court today reflects our preliminary view, consistent with the standards for interim relief."

But that interim relief allowed the clock to run out. Congress designated that the funding was meant to be paid during the fiscal year, and at the end of September, the funds lapsed.

Justice Elena Kagan noted this, writing in a dissent that the president had undermined Congress' power of the purse, that the application had not met the stringent standard for granting emergency relief, and that the consequences of the court's interim relief were permanent.

"I appreciate that the majority refrains from offering a definitive view of this dispute and the questions raised in it," she wrote. "But the effect of its ruling is to allow the executive to cease obligating $4 billion in funds that Congress appropriated for foreign aid, and that will now never reach its intended recipients."

The resulting funding cuts came as Warren's group, which focuses on preventing the spread of AIDS, was working on two big projects in several African nations. AVAC was preparing to start clinical trials of HIV vaccines, a program that was slimmed down considerably after the government pulled its funding. It was also building up the clinical infrastructure that would help introduce a new preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, which prevents the spread of HIV. The new injectable could be taken every six months — earlier, more expensive versions of the drug needed to be taken every two months. The group was building a network of healthcare providers and training them, and educating local communities about the ease with which they could stop the spread of HIV.

"Just when you're trying to roll out the most exciting opportunity in HIV prevention ever, we're starting not from a position of strength and building on a foundation that's rock solid, but rather, those programs were all terminated, and we are now doing this with one, if not both hands, tied behind our backs, and building on a foundation of sand, not of stone," he said.

Warren says he's had to lay off a third of AVAC's employees. Some African partner organizations that were dependent on its sub-grants have closed down, he said, and almost all of them have laid off staff.

"These things all just vanished literally with the stroke of a pen — projects that had taken years," he said.

Irreparable Harm

In January 2025, Trump issued an executive order on "prioritizing military excellence and readiness," which claimed that allowing transgender soldiers to serve in the military flouted "requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion."

That couldn't have been further from the experience of Sgt. Videl Leins, who'd served in the U.S. Air Force for 14 years before telling superiors of plans to transition to a woman in late 2022. The process of coming out as trans was, she said, "very, very beautiful" — her colleagues were accepting, she started hormones without taking any leave, and there was even a military-mandated training course that advised her on the legal and medical steps she might need to take. The process improved her mental health, and made her more focused, she said.

"I continued to meet the same standards, perform the same missions, and carry out the same responsibilities I always did. It never had an effect on who I was and how I did my job," she said. "The biggest change … was no longer having to spend my energy hiding who I was. My co-workers still knew me as the same person they had beside them for years."

Leins had enlisted in 2008 after graduating from high school, and had served all over the country and abroad as an electrical engineer. She said she deployed five times, including a tour in Iraq, where she was in charge of maintaining power grids for the automatic missile defense system that detected and destroyed incoming artillery, rockets and mortars. She was in the process of applying for the Nurse Enlisted Commissioning Program, which allows active-duty members of the Air Force to finish a nursing degree, and receive commission as officers after graduation.

"All that got undermined, all that was stopped," she told Law360. "Prior to this policy and prior to everything, I had no plans to get out. I was planning to stay 20, 25, 30, years — staying until they didn't want me no more. I just didn't expect it to be so soon."

When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, responding to Trump's executive order, implemented a policy that encouraged trans service members to step down or else be forced out in February 2025, Leins worried what it could mean for her medical care and the career she'd spent her entire adult life building. After Leins and a group of trans troops won a preliminary injunction barring the policy a month later, she said, "I honestly believed we'd won."

But that May, the high court sided with the government, allowing the ban on trans service members to go back into effect while the case proceeded, and, Leins said, her future "was placed in limbo."

She considered her military career over, and decided to step down in December.

"The damage has been done. They put me on administrative leave for almost a year. I didn't even get to test for my previous promotion rank, because I was deemed nonpromotional," she said. "Everything that happened was so chaotic. Even if the policy gets reverted, there's so many careers that have been completely destroyed, and I don't think there's a way to come back from having a service member's records just torched."

The Pentagon has estimated that about 4,000 service members identify as transgender. That would suggest that the military has been functioning fine with the presence of trans troops, according to Liens' attorney, Sasha Buchert of Lambda Legal, and it also points to how many careers may be upended by the policy.

A predicate the Supreme Court must consider when granting emergency relief is "irreparable harm." The court has consistently found that the government suffers harm when it is blocked by a lower court. Justices also are supposed to consider the balance of harms and equities for each party. Buchert said that transgender troops' careers have taken an irreparable hit since the Hegseth policy was enacted, with a lasting effect that's far greater than the harm of the administration not pursuing its policy agenda.

Buchert said even if the ban were lifted by a subsequent administration, the gap in trans troops' service creates "opportunity costs" and "places you in extreme disadvantage for the rest of your career.

"I just don't understand how you could work out some kind of calculus that says the government is experiencing more irreparable harm here," she said.

While harm to an individual is distinct and obvious, the court has found that "there's harm on the other side of the ledger" as well, according to South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman.

"Any time the government cannot enforce a federal law, there's an injury. The sovereign is hurt. And not just the government, it's the people, because the people elected the government to make laws," he said. "How do you resolve a case with an injury on both sides? You more or less settle on the merits. You make the best judgment on what the merits will say, and then you go from there."

The court essentially assumes there's always an injury at stake for both sides, Blackman said, but it's "not in the business of saying who is hurt more."

Some decisions have a trickle-down effect that harms not only the parties in a case, but those reliant on them.

Two weeks after the court allowed the U.S. Department of Education to go through with its planned reduction in force in its July 2025 McMahon v. New York decision, the department fired 1,000 employees.

But the effect didn't stop with those who lost their jobs in Washington. Schools all over the country felt pinched as the department's depleted workforce struggled to pay out funding to schools, according to Michael Brix, a public schoolteacher at the Woodruff Career & Technical Center in Peoria, Illinois.

Woodruff offers elective classes to high school juniors and seniors, and Brix teaches construction, introducing students to various trades like plumbing, carpentry and electrical work through field trips and internships, many of which lead to jobs. Brix said the education he offers is vital for students who aren't interested in school, but "have no clue what they want to do."

But hands-on programs like Woodruff's require a lot of raw materials, from lumber, cement mix and paint for construction courses to perishable foods for the culinary arts classes, and with the DOE staff cuts, funding took weeks to get to the programs. Brix is on the American Federation of Teachers' Career and Technical Education Committee, and meets with counterparts from all over the country who are dealing with similar concerns.

"We've already seen, in the last year, grants that are coming to us have slowed down," he said. "We operate usually in quarters, so each quarter we know what our funding is to do the chapters in the book or the modules that we're set up to do. So, if we don't have that money, then we're changing the curriculum that we have set in place for that quarter."

Farther from home, foreign aid cuts are already starting to affect public health abroad, according to Warren of the AIDS nonprofit AVAC. Data from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief indicates that after the $4 billion dissolve in September, the number of people starting use of the prophylactic treatment PrEP was down 41%, from 659,447 in the last quarter of 2024 to 387,990 in the same period of 2025.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year that "no one has died" due to the aid cuts. Warren said he can't debate that assertion by saying, "here are body bags to count," but added that for a disease like AIDS, while the harm of cutting prevention is immediate, the death toll may be yet to come. Antiretrovirals not only keep people infected with HIV healthy, they also suppress the virus so they can't transmit it.

"If people aren't getting tested, if they aren't coming back to the clinic, if they aren't picking up their drugs, they may not die because of that today or tomorrow. But they may die sooner than they would have otherwise," he said. "And I think we're going to begin to see data in the next several months that begin to show us that people are dying."

Copy Cat Opinions

Last year, TPS holders consistently won in the district courts, with trial judges writing lengthy opinions pausing the revocation of protected status. But as more of those cases moved up on appeal, the rulings were shorter and less consistent.

And, circuit courts may now feel free to follow the justices' lead and issue their own shadow docket-style rulings.

After the Supreme Court stayed a favorable lower court ruling for immigrants from Venezuela, a similar case involving TPS holders from Nicaragua, Nepal and Honduras won relief in the trial court twice. Those decisions ended up before the Ninth Circuit.

The first time, the panel granted the government's request for a stay on an emergency basis without explanation. It was, in effect, a shadow docket ruling from the intermediate appellate court, said UCLA School of Law professor Ahilan Arulanantham, who represented the TPS holders. He said the spread of the shadow docket's unexplained orders "undermines the basic rule of law notion that you have to give reason."

"If the Supreme Court can stay in one paragraph a 70-page decision, so can three judges of the circuit court, and they can do it even in cases where they're not predicting what the Supreme Court will do," he said.

In the second appeal, the Ninth Circuit again sided with the government. Its six-page opinion that came down in February noted that it wasn't "writing on a blank slate" because the Supreme Court had twice stayed district court orders blocking TPS revocations for Venezuelans, and while "those orders contained no reasoning," the government had successfully made similar arguments about the harm it would endure, and "we have been admonished that the court's stay orders must inform 'how [we] should exercise [our] equitable discretion in like cases.'"

That panel was quoting the high court's order in July 2025 in an emergency application in Trump v. Boyle , in which the court allowed the president to fire Democratic members of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The justices' Boyle opinion cited yet another emergency application in Trump v. Wilcox , noting that two months prior, the court had allowed the president to discharge Democrats from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The Boyle decision said that while its "interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits," they ought to inform lower court decisions in similar cases.

Justice Kagan criticized the Boyle decision as relying on "the scantiest of explanations" and criticized the notion that a prior emergency order should provide guidance on emergency rulings in subsequent cases. She noted that the Wilcox decision itself was short, lamenting that "another under-reasoned emergency order undergirds" the Boyle order.

Justice Kagan's disapproval aside, Vladeck said the court has increasingly treated interim orders as if they were precedent, which makes the job of lower courts more difficult, especially when there's little explanation that will allow trial and intermediate appellate judges to understand "what the heck they're suggesting."

"What's lost is guidance — guidance to lower courts about how to handle this case or like cases, guidance to the parties about what of their behavior is or is not lawful, guidance to the public about why the court has done what it has done," he said. "The court has long described its own legitimacy as being deeply tied to its ability to persuade — not to persuade us with the principles that justices are espousing, but at least to persuade us that they are espousing principles. And when the court either writes nothing or writes very, very little, it loses that opportunity."

Arulanantham said that it's important for questions to percolate in lower courts, "and you skip all of that if the Supreme Court just decides everything in advance."

And the lag between an emergency and a merits decision can be significant, according to Taraleigh Davis, a Bradley University professor of public law and political science with a forthcoming book that offers an empirical analysis of the shadow docket.

"In a regular case, from the point of a circuit court decision, we're talking 18 months … before that deep review," she said. "Depending on what the relief is, that's a long time for that to be the reality, whether the plaintiff is granted relief or not. The plaintiff is living in that reality."

Hours before two large earthquakes hit Venezuela, 146 people were flown there from Texas and held at Hotel Santuario La Llanada in the coastal state of La Guaira. The building collapsed, and most of those who'd been on the deportation flight earlier that day were killed or remain missing. At least one of them — Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez, a 28-year-old who'd been living in Florida — had been a TPS holder, according to the Spanish-language newspaper El País.

In that sense, Finol is one of the lucky ones — she survived the earthquakes. But the walls of her house cracked, she doesn't have electricity, and the water only comes on at night after she goes to sleep. Sometimes the gas doesn't work, and so she can't cook.

When she thinks about what the past year would have been like had she been able to stay in the U.S., she envisions her family living together, she and her husband working, and their son getting the treatment he needs.

"Everything would have been different," she said.

--Additional reporting by Carolina Bolado. Editing by Daniela Porat and Orlando Lorenzo.

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