Trump v. Kingdom: SCOTUS Denies the Stay — the BOP Transgender-Care Cutoff Stays Blocked, Thomas and Alito Dissenting
UPDATE (Oct. 21, 2026): The watch fired — and it went against the government. The Supreme Court declined to lift Judge Royce Lamberth's block on the Bureau of Prisons policy cutting off hormone treatment and social accommodations for transgender federal inmates, denying the government's emergency application in Trump v. Kingdom (No. 26A416) over the public dissents of Justices Thomas and Alito. Per The Hill: "The Supreme Court refused the Trump administration's bid to stop providing transgender inmates hormone treatments and certain surgeries on Wednesday, declining to lift a lower judge's block over the dissents of two conservative justices." Neither the majority nor the dissenters wrote any reasoning.
The scale of the surprise is the story: "It's a rare loss for the Trump administration, which has emerged victorious more than two dozen times in asking the high court for emergency relief after a judge blocked an aspect of the president's agenda." Solicitor General D. John Sauer had argued the cutoff was needed to maintain "institutional security" in federal prisons; the D.C. Circuit had ruled 2-1 below that there was "no trace of any specific security incident" behind the policy — the ruling the ACLU called rationales "contrived to support the demand President Trump made in the EO."
What it means: the second emergency-docket data point inside 48 hours — a rare outright denial of the administration's stay appetite on Oct. 21, followed the next day by an 8-1 grant of a state's Purcell stay in the New Hampshire voter-ID case (SCOTUS Grants New Hampshire's Purcell Stay, 8-1 — the Student-ID Ban Is Back for Nov. 3). The emergency docket is not a rubber stamp, but its election-eve election-law output ran the state's way. Lamberth's order and the D.C. Circuit holding now stand while the appeal proceeds on the merits.