Reviewing another atrocious Supreme Court term

This piece was originally published at The Big Picture, a great newsletter focused on big issues facing politics, culture, and our communities. They are reader-supported, so consider subscribing!

It’s never a good sign when, on a Supreme Court decision day, the Chief Justice announces that three of the day’s opinions have been authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the justice possibly best known for flying a pro-January 6 flag outside of his house. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened yesterday, with Alito issuing his signature brand of hyperpartisan rulings on some of the most important issues of the day.

Yesterday, the MAGA justices who make up the majority of the Court did what they were nominated to the bench to do: deliver wins to Donald Trump and his allies. Thursday’s decisions included rulings that represent a massive blow to common sense gun laws and a series of anti-immigration cases that will throw legal status into chaos for hundreds of thousands of people currently living in the United States and for those who seek asylum here.

Wolford v. Lopez

First up was the Court’s decision in Wolford v. Lopez. This case involved a challenge to a concealed handgun law enacted in Hawaii that banned the carrying of concealed handguns on private property open to the public without first receiving the owner’s express permission. The law effectively codified what most people already believe: that guns aren’t allowed in public places unless expressly stated otherwise.

That understanding has been the default in this country since our founding. When most of us go to a space like those at issue here—a grocery store, a beach, a concert venue, a restaurant—we assume that the experience will be gun-free. But the gun lobby disagreed, and it used its vast wealth to support a “gun-rights” association in Hawaii, the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, in bringing this case against Hawaii’s exceedingly commonsense law.

The Hawaii Firearms Coalition argued that, contra what is largely considered common sense and practice, the default should actually be that guns are automatically allowed on private property open to the public, even if you haven’t gotten permission to bring your gun first.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed, and sided with the gun lobby. This was not the first—nor will it be the last—time the right-wing majority jumped in to overturn a commonsense gun law meant to keep people safe. Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees not just the formation of a militia but an individual right to own a handgun in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the agenda of the Court majority has been clear : They care more about guns than they do about the American people—who by and large are sick of having to worry about guns invading every aspect of their lives.

The Court’s jurisprudence on guns has only worsened since Heller. In 2022, the Court ruled that states could not pass laws restricting guns unless there was a historically analogous restriction on firearms dating back to the drafting of the Second Amendment. In other words, unless states can show there was a similar firearm restriction from the 1700s, or unless they can show that there has been an established “history and tradition” of regulating firearms in a given way, they cannot pass new restrictions on guns here in the 21st century. Against that backdrop, it’s hard to imagine any limitations on guns and those who carry them that this majority would permit. They’re more interested in protecting gun owners and gun manufacturers, who make billions each year by selling the lie that public places are inherently dangerous, than the rest of us, who simply want to buy groceries without fearing for our lives.

The ruling in Wolford won’t be limited to Hawaii. It is nearly guaranteed that similar gun regulations across the country will also be challenged and overturned, effectively creating a national rule allowing concealed guns in public places everywhere by default, and further preempting states from addressing gun violence through legislation. As usual, the right-wing SCOTUS has thrown our country into chaos and left legislators without a remedy. As Justice Jackson put it in her dissent, “Today’s decision makes one thing clear: The Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any principle of law.”

Mullin v. Doe

The Court also dealt a significant blow to immigrants currently in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, as well as those seeking asylum at the border. The first of these announced decisions was Mullin v. Doe, a case challenging Donald Trump’s attempts to terminate TPS for Syrian and Haitian nationals currently living and working in the United States legally under that program. As the name suggests, TPS is a temporary immigration status designation offered to nationals from countries that the Secretary of Homeland Security has deemed unsafe. The program was enacted by Congress in 1990, and Haiti and Syria have both been under this designation for years due to political instability, violence, and war (and in Haiti’s case, due to ongoing instability caused by the deadly earthquake in 2010), allowing nationals of both countries to enter the U.S. as TPS holders and establish themselves here. There are hundreds of thousands of people from both countries who have settled in the U.S. under this program and have lived and worked here in some cases for over a decade.

But Donald Trump is an anti-immigrant bigot who spent a large portion of the 2024 presidential campaign spreading deranged falsehoods about Haitians in particular (remember when he accused them of “eating the dogs [and] eating the cats”?), has called Haiti a “shithole,” and has suggested that Haitian in this country “probably have AIDS,” a series of statements that any reasonable person would view, at best, as racially coded, and at worst, outright racist.

In 2025, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem canceled TPS for Venezuela, and announced that the administration would be canceling TPS for both Haiti and Syria, despite the fact that conditions in both countries haven’t improved much since they were originally designated unsafe in the first place. In fact, the Haitian national soccer team has been unable to play a home game there since 2021, and their coach has been unable to visit the island at all due to worsening gang violence.

Yesterday, the 6-3 MAGA majority rejected challenges from Haitian and Syrian TPS holders asking for relief, and sided with Trump. Alito and the majority waved away claims that the administration’s termination of TPS for these countries was not “overtly racial,” despite Trump’s appalling comments, because the administration was able to demonstrate non-racist reasons for their policy decisions. But, as usual, the liberal justices were correct, both morally and on the law. In her dissent, joined by Justices Jackson and Sotomayor, Kagan wrote that it was “plain to see” that race played a role in terminating TPS, which “includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”

The ruling in Mullin could and very likely will lead to a mass deportation effort resulting in the removal of hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Haitian nationals. But Trump won’t stop there. Now that the Court has blessed his efforts to cancel TPS at his own racist whims, millions of TPS holders from other unsafe countries could be uprooted from their lives here in the U.S. and sent back to countries rife with war, violence, and ongoing humanitarian crises.

Mullin v. Al Otro Lado

But Alito wasn’t done. In his final decision for the day, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, he and the majority again ruled in favor of Trump’s racist border policies, this time holding that the government can turn away migrants fleeing persecution in their home countries without hearing their claims for asylum.

Previously, asylum seekers had the right to enter the U.S. and make their case from a place of relative safety. But after today’s ruling, asylum seekers will be required to apply from the very place they’re trying to escape. But if asylum seekers cannot enter the United States while their cases are pending, they are put right back into the danger they are fleeing, potentially with deadly consequences.

This policy of turning asylum-seekers away at the border had been defunct since 2021, but Trump was desperate to revive it, and the Supreme Court acquiesced. This decision will carry massive humanitarian implications. As Erika Pinheiro, the executive director for Al Otro Lado, said in a statement, “This decision has destroyed the United States’ position as a global leader in promoting the rights of refugees and threatens to serve as a dangerous justification for other countries that unlawfully prevent refugees from crossing borders in search of safety. In a world of increasing conflict and climate disaster, this hardening of borders to keep out the most vulnerable is sure to result in many more lives lost.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented vigorously from the majority opinion, reading her entire dissent out loud from the bench--a relatively unusual move from the justices, who rarely do this unless they want to signal to the public that they are very, very pissed off about the majority opinion. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor recalled the M.S. St. Louis, a ship that left Nazi Germany in 1939 with 900 Jewish refugees on board. The ship was denied entry to Cuba, Canada, and the United States, and was forced to return to Europe. 250 of the refugees on board ultimately died in the Holocaust. Federal agents who physically block migrants from ports of entry to make their claims for asylum from a place of safety are “turn[ing] the ship back,” Sotomayor wrote.

She continued:

Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past. 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 US soil.

The majority’s interpretation permits the government to do that even if the refugees complied with all applicable laws and regulations, ...even if turning them back would result in the very persecution from which they narrowly escaped. The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not. More people will be forced to walk along the U.S.-Mexico border in dangerous conditions, trying to find a port that will inspect them. More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.

Once Justice Sotomayor was finished reading her dissent, which was twice as long as the majority opinion, Justice Alito was clearly irritated at being called for authoring such a brutal opinion. Alito, known for being one of our most petty Supreme Court Justices, sniped back at Sotomayor, kicking off a rare verbal tussle between the justices in public. According to SCOTUSblog, Alito leaned in his microphone in what I assume was a sneer, and said “There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” and reiterated a weak defense of his ruling before moving on.

Donald Trump and his acolytes on the Supreme Court don’t care about moral leadership, though. They care about making their perceived enemies suffer, and they have decided that immigrants are our enemy. Allowing this Supreme Court to continue its campaign of partisan favors, bigoted rulings, and revocation of hard-won constitutional rights is not an option. For too long, Congress has allowed the Court to transform itself into an arm of the GOP without a word. Congress has the constitutional imperative to perform oversight over this corrupt Court, and it must act.

If Democrats win back the House, Senate, or in a perfect world, both, the Court cannot continue to be treated as some untouchable entity. The justices and the Court itself must be on the reform agenda, and our country cannot risk anything short of a serious overhaul of the judicial branch.