Trump administration lawyers asked the justices to limit the sweep of decisions by three lower courts that issued nationwide pauses on the policy.

What left Alito so dazed? Joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, he lamented his majority colleagues’ refusal to intervene against “a single district-court judge” making the government “pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars.”