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UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

Gorsuch, J., concurring in judgment

them. Even so, a vacatur order still does nothing to redress the States’ injuries. The Guidelines merely advise federal officials about how to exercise their prosecutorial discretion when it comes to deciding which aliens to prioritize for arrest and removal. A judicial decree rendering the Guidelines a nullity does nothing to change the fact that federal officials possess the same underlying prosecutorial discretion. Nor does such a decree require federal officials to change how they exercise that discretion in the Guidelines’ absence. It’s a point even the States have acknowledged. Tr. of Oral Arg. 82–83; see also id., at 75–77, 125.

Faced with that difficulty, the States offer this reply. As a practical matter, they say, we can expect federal officials to alter their arrest and prosecution priorities in light of a judicial opinion reasoning that the Guidelines are unlawful. See id., at 80, 82–83. But this doesn’t work either. Whatever a court may say in an opinion does no more to compel federal officials to change how they exercise their prosecutorial discretion than an order vacating the Guidelines. Nor do we measure redressability by asking whether a court’s legal reasoning may inspire or shame others into acting differently. We measure redressability by asking whether a court’s judgment will remedy the plaintiff’s harms. As this Court recently put it: “It is a federal court’s judgment, not its opinion, that remedies an injury; thus it is the judgment, not the opinion, that demonstrates redressability.” Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U. S. ___, ___ (2023) (slip op., at 32). If the rule were otherwise, and courts could “simply assume that everyone … will honor the legal rationales that underlie their decrees, then redressability [would] always exist.” Franklin v. Massachusetts, 505 U. S. 788, 825 (1992) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment).

Perhaps sensing they have run into yet another roadblock, the States try one last way around it. Fleetingly, they direct us to the parenthetical in §1252(f)(1): “(other than the Supreme Court).” That language, they say, allows