Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco
The Court declined to decide whether states could intervene to defend a federal immigration rule that the new administration had abandoned, finding the case too procedurally tangled to reach the question it originally agreed to answer.
Four justices wrote separately to flag serious concerns about the Government's tactics — using a court judgment from separate litigation to repeal the rule without going through normal notice-and-comment rulemaking — and to emphasize that those questions remain entirely open.
How it got here: Multiple courts found the 2019 Public Charge Rule unlawful; the new administration dropped its appeals; 13 states sought to intervene; the Ninth Circuit denied intervention; the Supreme Court agreed to hear that question but then dismissed.
The Case in Depth
What happened
In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rule making it harder for immigrants to get green cards if they were likely to rely on public benefits — the so-called Public Charge Rule. Several cities and states sued, arguing the rule defined "public charge" too broadly. When a new administration took office, the Government dropped its appeals of lower-court rulings against the rule and used one of those judgments to repeal the rule without holding a public-comment period, as it would normally have been required to do.
The question before the Court
Could a group of states step in and defend a federal immigration rule in court after the new administration chose to stop defending it — and to use an opposing court judgment to wipe out the rule without normal public-input procedures?
The Court's answer
The Court did not answer this question. After agreeing to decide only whether 13 states supporting the rule should have been allowed to step in and defend it in the Ninth Circuit, the Court found the case had become too procedurally complicated to resolve that question cleanly.
The Government's reversal of course — dropping its own appeals, then using a consent judgment from separate litigation to repeal the rule without going through normal notice-and-comment procedures — generated a tangle of unresolved legal issues involving standing, mootness, the scope of nationwide court orders, and more. Rather than wade through all of those issues, the Court dismissed the case and left them for future litigation.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The dismissal leaves unresolved whether states can step in to defend federal regulations when a new administration stops defending them. It also leaves open a significant question about whether agencies can use court judgments from one case to bypass the public-comment process normally required to repeal a rule — a tactic several justices called deeply troubling.
What changes now
The dismissal is not a decision on the merits of any of the issues Roberts raised. Related litigation continues — including a pending Seventh Circuit appeal — and the Biden administration published a proposed replacement rule in early 2022. Courts in future cases will have to work through the unresolved questions about nationwide vacatur, notice-and-comment obligations, and state intervention rights that this case left open.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly said the dismissal reflects no view on any of the open legal questions Roberts listed, including the validity of the rule's repeal, the propriety of nationwide court orders in regulatory challenges, how notice-and-comment requirements apply in this unusual circumstance, or the outcome of any related pending or future litigation.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Roberts
Chief Justice Roberts, joined by three colleagues, concurred in the dismissal but wrote at length to explain what made the case so tangled. He described how the new administration dismissed its own appeals and then used a consent judgment from separate litigation to repeal the Public Charge Rule without going through notice-and-comment procedures — a tactic he labeled 'rulemaking-by-collective-acquiescence.' He emphasized that the dismissal should not be read as approval of any of those maneuvers or as foreclosing future challenges.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court originally agreed to decide a narrow procedural question: whether 13 states that supported the 2019 Public Charge Rule should have been allowed to intervene in the Ninth Circuit to continue defending the rule after the new administration dropped its own defense.
- But the new administration's maneuvers created a dense web of unresolved threshold questions that would have to be untangled first — including whether any party still had standing to sue, whether the case was moot, what scope of court orders is appropriate in administrative-law challenges, and how the Administrative Procedure Act's (APA) procedural requirements applied to the Government's unusual tactic.
- The core of the tactic Roberts described: the Government voluntarily dismissed its appeals of lower-court rulings against the rule, then pointed to a final judgment in a separate case as justification for immediately repealing the rule — without the public notice-and-comment process that normally must accompany the repeal of a rule originally issued through that same process.
- Under the APA, a rule made through notice-and-comment (as the Public Charge Rule was) can generally only be undone through notice-and-comment. Roberts flagged that bypassing this requirement by leveraging a consent judgment from different litigation — a tactic he called 'rulemaking-by-collective-acquiescence' — raises serious questions about whether the Government followed the law.
- Because all of these complications were tangled up with the narrow intervention question the Court had agreed to decide, the Court concluded it could not cleanly answer that question without resolving a host of issues well beyond what it had taken the case to address, and therefore dismissed.