Thursday was a decision day at the Supreme Court, and the American people got to enjoy the familiar experience of waiting on tenterhooks yet again to see which rights were going to be deleted this time. The answer was residency rights for hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants.
The most important of Thursday’s decisions was also the worst one: Mullin v. Doe, which overturned a lower-court order barring the Trump regime from removing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of nonwhite refugees.
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For months now, Haitian and Syrian recipients of the TPS program have been in limbo, with their legal status being held up by fragile pauses in lower-court rulings. After revoking TPS for Venezuelan nationals last winter with the support of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, the Trump administration turned its attention to doing the same for Haitian and Syrian immigrants. In February, Haitian residents in cities like Springfield, Ohio, were bracing for an ICE surge planned for the day after TPS protections were set to expire. A ruling by a federal judge halted the decision just in time, but the threat of a violent immigration enforcement campaign remained, and now is entirely possible thanks to the Supreme Court.
In Mullin, the Court ruled 6-3 that the federal government could terminate protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria, which will open the door for the deportation of thousands. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion (unsurprisingly, the ruling occurred along ideological lines), in which he noted that the wording of the TPS statute prohibited judicial review. Therefore, the courts cannot bar the Trump administration from ending TPS designations, allowing for complete administration discretion over what countries will be covered by the program. Before the Department of Homeland Security began ending TPS protections a year ago, over 1.3 million immigrants were protected by the initiative, hailing from 13 different countries.
Justice Samuel Alito refused to categorize Trump’s xenophobic comments about Haitian people as proof that ending TPS was racially motivated.
TPS was originally established in 1990 to allow immigrants in the U.S. who are unable to return to their home country because of dangerous conditions such as armed conflict or environmental disaster to safely work and live in the U.S. But now, about 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians are at risk of being deported back to countries where many don’t have a home to go back to.
Although the State Department has issued a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti and Syria, the Trump administration has declared that refugees are safe to return. Presidential elections have not been held in Haiti for over a decade, and armed gang violence has intensified over the past year, leading 1 in 10 people to flee their homes. Food insecurity affects nearly six million people, health facilities are underfunctioning, and many children lack access to education since schools have been closed. Conditions in Syria are also fraught—the country is still recovering from the Syrian Civil War, which displaced millions.
Writing for the majority, Alito refused to categorize Trump’s xenophobic comments about Haitian people as proof that ending TPS was racially motivated. In fact, he stated that statements cited by the plaintiffs were not “overtly racial” and that “respondents are unlikely to prove that race was a motivating factor in the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation.” This, of course, is total nonsense, as Trump has not shied away from espousing blatantly racist conspiracy theories and comments about Haitian people since before he was even elected.
Most infamously, Trump’s random outburst about Haitian refugees during an ABC presidential debate with Joe Biden during the 2024 election reflects his early inclinations to target Haitian immigrants. After claiming that Haitian people in Springfield were “eating” the community’s cats and dogs, at least 30 bomb and shooting threats were made in the city, with many targeting schools. Since being elected, Trump has referred to Haiti as a “shithole country,” and said that Haitians “probably have AIDS” and that they are “poisoning the blood of the country.”
Yet six out of the Court’s nine justices determined (or pretended) that those statements, and more, weren’t proof that the federal government’s elimination of TPS for Haitian people was a result of anti-Black racism. If the past tells us anything, DHS will intentionally target Haitian communities in the U.S. for deportation, forcing thousands to experience the violent, lawless behavior of immigration enforcement.
In clearing the way to deport TPS recipients back to their home countries, the Trump administration has signaled yet again that the safety of marginalized people is not a priority. Indeed, they would rather send individuals who arguably make the U.S. stronger (studies have shown that Haitian TPS holders contribute billions to the national economy every year) back to a country where U.S. citizens are told not to go.
THE COURT’S OTHER DECISIONS THURSDAY were somewhat less outrageous. In Monsanto v. Durnell, the Court held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) preempts state “failure to warn” laws when it comes to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Then, because the EPA has not deemed glyphosate a cancer risk, Monsanto can’t be sued for failing to warn about it, meaning the decision will block thousands of pending lawsuits. It was a rare 7-2 partisan split, with Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch dissenting.
At first blush, this isn’t totally crazy. The evidence that glyphosate causes cancer is not firmly settled. Multiple meta-analyses have found little or no link between the chemical and various cancers, and given how much of it is used—more than 250 million pounds per year just in the U.S.—one would think any carcinogenic effect would be obvious. That said, on Tuesday Mother Jones reported that a key 2013 paper the EPA relied on to make its determination on glyphosate was actually ghostwritten by Monsanto itself, and that the agency knew about it, did not tell the public, and continued to rely on the study. The decision sets a tacit precedent that corporate interests can compromise their regulators, then point to those regulators’ inaction as the reason why no one can sue them.
Durnell also featured a typically deranged concurrence from Clarence Thomas in which he claimed that FIFRA is unconstitutional because neither manufacturing nor agriculture is part of commerce. For proof, he cited his own previous deranged concurrences, making a sort of ouroboros of conservative constitutional Calvinball.
In any case, it is yet another big fat loss handed to the so-called MAHA movement, which has been campaigning against glyphosate for years. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that it not only causes cancer but is somehow responsible for the obesity epidemic. Delusional woo-woo wellness cranks are getting the same result that everyone else who thinks it’s possible to make an alliance of convenience with Trump gets: betrayed.
In Wolford v. Lopez, the Court continued its long tradition of doing as much as possible to make mass shootings more easy and convenient. In 2022, with New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it invented a right to carry a concealed weapon; in 2024, with Garland v. Cargill, it legalized a form of fully automatic machine gun; and now this decision has struck down a Hawaiian law that required gun owners to get permission before carrying their weapons on private property that is open to the public, like grocery stores or gas stations.
The argument in Wolford is mostly citations to Bruen, a decision based on historical claims that are obviously, provably false, but the intentions of the right-wing majority are clear. They want it to be as easy as possible to carry as many guns as possible in as many places as possible (except the Supreme Court building itself, of course). The result will be more gun violence, though given how the Court has already destroyed so many much more effective gun control measures, hopefully not very much more.
This is American government in 2026: a half dozen unelected legal clerics ruling by decree, all but one of them appointed by presidents who first came into office after losing the popular vote, and whose decisions are, as a rule, either facially preposterous or unexplained entirely. In many ways, it is worse than the oppression the Founding Fathers rose up to throw off. At least King George III admitted to being a king.
