The Supreme Court Keeps Inviting Trump to Get More Ambitious
The justices don’t give Trump everything he wants. But they are very comfortable giving him a lot.
On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court closed out its 2025-26 term by handing down three opinions that, in order, (further) enhanced Republican lawmakers’ power to discriminate against trans kids, made it (even) easier for wealthy people to buy politicians, and preserved (barely) the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The justices clocked out for the summer—on the merits docket, at least—shortly thereafter, because the most reliable predictor of the pace of the Court’s work remains the justices’ desire to enjoy a long Fourth of July weekend.
As I wrote in Balls & Strikes this week, birthright citizenship was probably the term’s highest-profile case, in part because President Donald Trump cared so much about the result, and also because the relevance of an elderly social media addict’s gutter racism to the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments was, to say the least, a novel legal question. The facts that the Court (1) left the case until the very last day and (2) did not give Trump everything he wanted lent themselves well to a time-honored, recency bias-inflected format for end-of-the-term recaps: Once again, the justices delivered some wins for Trump and some losses for Trump, thus wrapping another dramatic season of Supreme Court, that long-running reality show in which nine elite lawyers go behind closed doors to decide who gets rights and who does not.
I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.
Do not get me wrong: It is good that the Court managed to affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as judges and politicians and scholars and everyone capable of reading at a fourth-grade level has understood it for more than a century. But two cases the Court decided last week—cases that earned less attention and yielded fewer breaking-news push alerts than birthright citizenship—paint a clearer picture of the Court’s disposition toward Trump halfway through his second term, and as the 2026 midterms approach.
In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court by a 6-3 vote held that because federal immigration law allows refugees to seek asylum upon arrival “in” the United States, if Customs and Border Patrol officers physically block access to the border (so that refugees cannot get “in”), the government can reduce (or maybe even eliminate) asylum claims altogether. This practice, known as “metering,” has not been in effect since 2021. But the signal that Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Al Otro Lado sends to the White House is that when its resident xenophobes come up with creative methods for evading laws that confer rights on noncitizens, this six-justice conservative supermajority will have no problem finding reasons to deem those methods legitimate.
On the same morning, the Court decided Mullin v. Doe, a case about Trump’s efforts to cancel temporary protected status for some 350,000 Haitian people and 6,000 Syrian people living in the United States. In (another) majority opinion from Alito, the Court said that doing so was fine, and rejected the notion that the president’s history of describing Haitian people as “filthy,” “disgusting,” and “poisoning the blood” of America might be at all legally relevant. Alito instead described Trump’s comments as “heated language” and not “overtly racial,” which is roughly analogous to describing Petey Pablo’s 2003 hit single “Freek-a-Leek” as not “especially sexual” and “mostly just a list of women’s names, if you think about it.”
Each of these cases presents a version of the same basic question: how willing the Court is to allow Trump to use the law to harm people (especially nonwhite people) he does not like or want. Reading the cases together, the answer is “very.” Again, Mullin v. Doe strips some 350,000 people of their legal status, and places the status of an additional 300,000 people in immediate jeopardy. Al Otro Lado buttresses the administration’s efforts to functionally end asylum, which for the last six months has been limited to white South Africans anyway. Only in the birthright citizenship case did the Court finally decide to put a governor on Trump’s power, and only in the sense that it preserved the status quo, and only by the narrowest possible margin.
Mullin v. Doe and Mullin v. Al Otro Lado are disastrous for the real-world people whose rights the Court chose not to protect. “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her Al Otro Lado dissent. “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.”
Conservative pundits in particular are fond of defending the Supreme Court by talking about how it does not do everything Trump asks, and often lavish their favorite justices with praise for serving as models of judicial independence. Which, sure, it is true that Trump’s win rate is not literally 100 percent. But year after year and on issue after issue, the Court has been awfully comfortable giving him a whole lot. Most importantly, it always makes clear to him that when he comes back and asks for more, he is sure to have a friendly audience.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading. Enjoy the holiday weekend.
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