Supreme Court Issued 63 Shadow Docket Orders and 56 Merits Decisions Last Term

In the Supreme Court term that ended in October 2025, justices issued 63 orders on the shadow docket compared with 56 signed orders on the merits docket, according to a ProPublica analysis of the court's records. The shadow docket consists of emergency applications that reach the court without full briefing, oral argument or signed opinions in most cases.

ProPublica compared the court's online docket with Penn State’s Supreme Court Database and identified more than 27,000 emergency applications filed between October 2003 and October 2025.

The Trump administration filed 32 emergency-docket petitions in 2025, a Brennan Center for Justice analysis showed. The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed eight such petitions over 16 years.

On June 23, 2025, the court granted the administration’s request to halt a lower-court order that would have required due process for eight men facing deportation to South Sudan. The men were removed after the ruling. Three months later the court permitted immigration agents to conduct stops based on racial or ethnic characteristics during ongoing litigation.

ProPublica previously reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens were stopped and detained by ICE agents last year, with almost all of the more than 50 held after agents confirmed citizenship being Latino. In May 2025 the court allowed Louisiana to redraw its electoral map during an ongoing election, eliminating one of two majority-Black districts.

The new map can be used for the 2026 midterms. Chief Justice John Roberts referred more substantive shadow-docket cases for a full-court vote than any other justice last term, accounting for nearly half of all such referrals. In the 2005 term he referred one case.