# D. John Sauer Solicitor General of the United States since April 2025 (confirmed 52–45), the lawyer who argues the second-term administration's cases at the Supreme Court — and, before that, the lawyer who won the case the second term rests on. Dean John Sauer clerked for Justice Scalia, was a federal prosecutor in St. Louis, and served as Missouri's solicitor general (2017–23) under then-Attorneys General Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, where he became a specialist in the state-led suits that defined the Biden years' litigation — the social-media "jawboning" case *Murthy v. Missouri*, the student-loan challenges, the vaccine-mandate cases. In private practice he then represented [[Donald Trump]] in *[[Trump v. United States]]* (2024), arguing for the presidential immunity the Court largely granted, and in the New York civil-fraud appeal. ## As Solicitor General His office has run the most aggressive emergency-docket strategy in the Court's history: roughly thirty interim applications in the term's first nineteen months — more than the Bush and Obama administrations filed in sixteen years combined — and from April to December 2025 the government won effectively all of them, on immigration, federal firings, spending freezes and the National Guard. Justice Kagan told Congress that granting so many encourages more. The merits docket has been harder. He argued and lost [[Learning Resources v. Trump]] (February 20, 2026, 6–3), where the Chief Justice singled out the government's brief for claiming the nation's wealth hung in the balance, and lost *[[Trump v. Barbara]]* (June 30, 2026, 6–3), the birthright-citizenship case, in which Roberts wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment's promise extends to "every free-born person in this land." The wins that matter came on the structure of the executive: *[[Trump v. Slaughter]]* (June 29, 2026) overruling *Humphrey's Executor* on removal, with *[[Trump v. Cook]]* the same day carving out the Federal Reserve. SCOTUSblog's September 2026 assessment describes his position as a tightrope between the Court's expectations of a Solicitor General and the President's — an office that has historically traded on its credibility with the Justices, run for a client who publicly demands rehearing when it loses. ## The emergency docket in practice — *D.V.D.*, September 24, 2026 On **Thursday, September 24, 2026** Sauer filed an emergency application asking the Court to let the administration resume rapid [[Third-Country Removal]]s — the government's **third** application to the Court in the same case. The First Circuit had held the policy unlawful on **September 18**; the administration continued removing people on the theory that the ruling was not yet in effect because the mandate had not issued; and the First Circuit dissolved its stay in a three-sentence clarification late on **September 23**. Sauer's application asked for an immediate administrative stay "to halt that chaos," arguing the government had not been given a chance to respond before the clarification and that the lower court's notice-and-screening requirements would delay removals under final orders. This is the emergency-docket pattern at its most compressed: an interim application filed within a day of an adverse clarification, on a policy the government has already twice persuaded the Court to un-block, in a case it has now lost on the merits below. The office's institutional argument for repeat access is urgency; the record here is that the urgency is generated by the government's own continued removals during the interval it says is unresolved. **The application succeeded.** On **September 29, 2026** the Court granted the stay over the dissents of Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson, without explanation, and granted certiorari with argument set for December 9 (*Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D.*, No. 26A406; cert docket No. 26-426). That makes three emergency wins out of three in the case, on a policy that two lower courts have now held unlawful on the merits. ## See Also - [[Third-Country Removal]] · [[ICE]] · [[Department of Homeland Security]] - [[Trump v. United States]] · [[Trump v. Barbara]] · [[Learning Resources v. Trump]] · [[Trump v. Slaughter]] · [[Trump v. Cook]] - [[Supreme Court of the United States]] · [[Donald Trump]] · [[Pam Bondi]] · [[Todd Blanche]]