Supreme Court Hands Trump Broad Power to End Asylum
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- Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along conservative lines to allow the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 4,000 Syrians who have lived and worked legally in the US for over a decade.
- The court cleared the way for officials to physically block asylum seekers from setting foot on US soil at the Mexico border, reviving a "metering" policy previously used during Trump's first term.
- Border officials won broad discretion to detain or deport lawful permanent residents accused of "moral turpitude" crimes without "clear and convincing evidence," Justice Department lawyers need not wait for proof.
- Justice Samuel Alito, writing on TPS, dismissed Trump's past remarks calling Haiti a "shithole country" and saying Haitians were "poisoning the blood" as insufficient to prove the policies were "overtly racial," arguing that terminating TPS for countries across South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia showed non-racial motivation.
- Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration agenda, went on Fox News the same day to denigrate migrants from "nations that have never had contact with the west" and explicitly invoked returning to the nativist immigration regime of the 1920s.
- The administration has paused nearly all refugees except white South Africans and previously stopped processing immigration applications from 39 mostly African and Middle Eastern countries, a policy a federal judge has since blocked.
- The court is still weighing whether Trump can deny birthright citizenship to children born in the US to temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants, a decision that could redefine American identity for millions.
Why it matters: The three rulings collectively strip legal status from people already living in the US and block new arrivals at the border, with the heaviest impact falling on Black, brown, and Asian immigrants from war and persecution. Alito's reasoning, that policies affecting multiple racial groups can't be racist, redefines how racial motivation can be proven in court, with attorney Ahilan Arulanantham calling it "deeply troubling" for racial justice broadly.
