The anti-immigrant Supreme Court

Faith-based groups hold a vigil at the court before a March hearing.Bill Clark/CQ/Roll Call

The Supreme Court made one thing plain this week: It is an anti-immigrant court. There were hints before—big ones, to be honest. But in three rulings this week, the Republican-appointed justices voted to green light Trump administration policies against immigrants that both defy federal law and carry a massive humanitarian toll. This week’s decisions display, at best, a callous disregard for the wellbeing and safety of millions of people. At worst, they signal that an anti-immigrant mindset has taken hold of the court’s conservative wing.

On Thursday, the court issued two decisions with shocking human consequences. First, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court allowed the administration to deny immigrants the right to apply for asylum simply by preventing them from technically crossing the border. The relevant law states that immigrants “arriving in” the US may apply for asylum. In a gotcha-type trick typical of a middle school bully, the administration claims that if it can prevent people from physically stepping across the border, they can ignore all the mandatory processes Congress set-up to process asylum seekers who come to the nation’s doorstep. The 6-3 majority agreed, using a juvenile grammatical argument to render the law contradictory and unenforceable. Because Congress used the preposition “in,” the administration is now free to defy the law and deny thousands of immigrants fleeing persecution their right to apply for asylum. The conclusion is as stupid as it is cruel.

Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in the case, joined by the other five GOP appointees, ignores the policy’s devastating toll. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent does not. She describes the violence visited upon immigrants as they endlessly wait in makeshift camps along the border to be able to apply for asylum, and the tragedy of mothers, fathers, and children drowning in the Rio Grande after being turned away from a port of entry. 

“The current asylum system developed in response to the international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In 1939, the United States turned away the M.S. St. Louis carrying Jewish refugees. Forced to return to Europe, many of its passengers died in concentration camps. “Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” she continued. “Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil.”

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she concluded. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Like in 1939, the blame for that bloodshed will be on the United States. In place of the statutory scheme Congress erected to remedy past mistakes, the majority lets the Trump administration repeat them. 

Whereas the asylum case allowed the Trump administration to turn away people seeking humanitarian relief, the next opinion gave it effectively unreviewable power to strip millions of immigrants of humanitarian relief they are already receiving in the US. Under federal law, the executive branch can grant people from crisis-torn countries what’s known as Temporary Protected Status, allowing them to legally stay in the US while their home countries remain unsafe. These TPS designations are periodically reviewed and can be extended or terminated depending on if conditions have improved.

In Alito’s opinion in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to prematurely terminate TPS for 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. The decision frees the administration to strip legal status from 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries. 

In revoking TPS for Haitians, the administration made a mockery of the legally-required process. Yet the Roberts Court blessed that lawlessness on Thursday by finding that the decision to revoke TPS is generally unreviewable by courts. As a result, the rules Congress put into law to govern TPS designations are now mere suggestions. Just as in the case about blocking immigrants from ports of entry, the six justices in the majority gave the president the authority to run roughshod over the law. In both cases, mostly nonwhite immigrants will suffer the dire consequences.