Today's opinions
• The Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to end temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from Haiti and Syria that have endured war and natural disasters.
• The court also cleared the way for the Trump administration to revive a controversial policy that aims to curb the number of migrants that officials at the southern border must process to determine whether they have a right to seek safe haven in the US.
• The justices struck down a Hawaii law that banned guns on private property open to the public where the owner hadn’t explicitly condoned the carrying of firearms.
Today's TPS ruling comes against the backdrop of deadly Venezuelan quakes
The Supreme Court’s decision on Temporary Protected Status on Thursday comes against the backdrop of twin quakes in Venezuela that have left at least 164 people dead and more than 900 injured.
It’s those types of natural disasters that, in previous years, the Department of Homeland Security secretary would consider in deciding whether Venezuelans already in the US should be extended deportation protections through TPS.
Haiti’s TPS designation, for example, originally stemmed from a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010. At the time, DHS determined Haitian nationals already in the US should be granted temporary protections from being sent back to their origin country, given country conditions. That relief has been extended, given country conditions, until being terminated by the Trump administration.
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem moved to terminate TPS for Venezuelans in the United States. As of Thursday, DHS, which is now led by Secretary Markwayne Mullin, is not planning to reverse course and extend protections to Venezuelans in the US in the wake of this week’s earthquakes, according to a US official.
Justice Kagan slams majority for avoiding Trump’s words
In the case involving the removal of deportation protections for Haitians, the justices got into a sharp back and forth over President Donald Trump’s own words.
One of the claims the Haitian beneficiaries of temporary protected status had made was that the president had acted with racial animus in shutting down the program. That was based in part on his comments, including his false assertion during the campaign that Haitians in Ohio were eating peoples’ pets.
If the Haitians could have demonstrated that Trump’s remarks pointed to a decision driven by racism, then they could have won their claims under the equal protection clause.
But Alito and the court’s other conservatives dismissed that argument.
“A person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations,” Alito wrote in the section of the opinion joined by only three of his colleagues. “The criteria for TPS designations guarantee that many, if not most, designated countries have such characteristics. Haiti is no exception. It is a very poor country, and living conditions there are unquestionably difficult.”
Notably, Alito did not reproduce Trump’s statements, which Justice Elena Kagan was quick to point out in her dissent.
Kagan then reproduced the statements herself, including Trump’s remarks that Haitians in Ohio were “eating the dogs … . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people.”
“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” Kagan wrote.
White House calls immigration decisions a ‘tremendous win’
The White House called the two immigration decisions handed down by the Supreme Court Thursday a “tremendous win” for the Trump administration.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the decision by the Supreme Court that it could not review the Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians was a “tremendous win” and “affirmed what President Trump has always maintained: temporary protected status is, by definition, temporary.”
“It was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency and it is committed to the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security,” she said in a statement to CNN.
Jackson also praised the decision that clears the way for Trump to revive a controversial immigration policy called “metering.” The change would allow officials at the southern border to curb the number of asylum claims they must process by turning some migrants away before they touch US soil.
She said Trump is committed to “restoring integrity to our immigration system,” including “egregious abuses to our asylum system.”
Haitian plaintiffs warn of "violent, needless deaths"
The legal team representing a group of Haitian nationals that lost at the Supreme Court on Thursday warned that the decision would “directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths.”
“It’s a very sad day, not only for Haitian TPS holders but for anyone who believes, as we do, that immigrants are one of America’s greatest strengths,” the lawyers said.
More Supreme Court opinions coming Monday
The Supreme Court will hand down additional opinions on Monday, but that will not be the final day of the term.
The court’s marshal announced after the last opinion Thursday that it would hand down more decisions Monday.
But perhaps more important was who didn’t speak. When the court is announcing its final opinion day of the term, that is announced by Chief Justice John Roberts.
There are eight cases still pending in the current term, including President Donald Trump’s bid to end automatic birthright citzenship, Trump’s effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whether states can ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ sports teams, and deadlines for mail-in ballots.
Alito fires back at Sotomayor after she reads dissent from the bench
Justice Samuel Alito fired back at Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a highly unusual and tense exchange on the bench Thursday after she had read her scathing dissent in one of his opinions.
Alito, who authored three of the four opinions the court released on Thursday, suggested that he didn’t realize that Sotomayor would read her dissent verbally — itself a rare situation.
The back-and-forth came amid signs of strife behind the curtain of the court as it veers toward its final days of the current term juggling a number of high-profile opinions involving President Donald Trump and culture war issues. The Alito-Sotomayor exchange was over a policy of turning asylum seekers away at the border, which the conservative majority blessed.
Alito seemed to be taken aback by Sotomayor’s strong language, and noted that two administrations had pursued the policy. The policy of “metering” asylum seekers began under former President Barack Obama but was formalized during Trump’s first term. The policy ended during former President Joe Biden’s administration and has not yet been reinstated.
Responding to Sotomayor after her bench statement, Alito described the asylum policy as “orderly and humane,” before turning to his next opinion.
That next opinion allowed the Trump administration to cancel temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian nationals.
Trump admin. has said it wants to keep controversial policy option on the table
The controversial asylum policy known as “metering” that the Supreme Court said was lawful has not been in effect in recent years. But the administration told the court earlier this year that it needed clarity on whether it could, in theory, reimplement the policy should conditions at the Southern border worsen.
“The administration would like to be able to reinstate metering if and when border conditions justify,” Assistant Solicitor General Vivek Suri told the court as it scrutinized the policy. “I cannot predict in advance what border conditions will look like or what specific policy responses the administration would take in response to that.”
The policy first started under President Barack Obama, was championed by Trump during his first term and later rescinded under President Joe Biden.
Court decides temporary immigration protection case by concluding it can’t decide
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in the case dealing with Temporary Protected Status, essentially said the Supreme Court couldn’t review whether the Trump administration had appropriately reviewed the status for Haitians and Syrians because the law bars courts from doing so.
“The secretary’s TPS designation decisions are not subject to judicial review,” Alito wrote for the court. “The text of the TPS judicial-review bar very clearly overcomes the general presumption in favor of judicial review.”
Alito also wrote the plaintiffs’ equal protection clause claim failed. The Haitian plaintiffs had argued that Trump’s comments about Haiti during his campaign demonstrated racial animosity.
“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.
Sotomayor says “more people will die” under court’s asylum ruling
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent joined by the court’s other two liberals. Sotomayor, the court’s senior most liberal, took the unusual step of reading her opinion aloud from the bench.
“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” Sotomayor wrote.
In skewering her conservative colleagues over their decision, Sotomayor invoked a World War II-era episode during which the US turned away the MS St. Louis, a ship ferrying nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in 1939. The ship later returned to Europe, where many of the passengers perished in the Holocaust.
“If the refugees on the MS 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,” Sotomayor wrote.
Vladeck: Immigration double whammy from Samuel Alito
“The Supreme Court’s two major immigration rulings on Thursday are both major wins for the Trump administration – not by upholding the government’s substantive policies, but by dramatically limiting the ability of courts to review those policies,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“It would be one thing if the justices went out of their way to defend the lawfulness of the government’s immigration measures, but by holding instead only that courts have at most a limited role to play in checking the executive, the Court is largely throwing up its (and the judiciary’s) hands — at perhaps the worst possible moment in American history to be doing so.”
Supreme Court allows Trump to end temporary immigration protections for Haitians and Syrians
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump to end temporary deportation protections for potentially millions of foreign nationals who hail from countries like Haiti and Syria that have endured war and natural disasters.
The decision over what’s known as Temporary Protected Status was among the most significant immigration matters to reach the high court during Trump’s second term, and it means that as many as 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians in the United States legally could lose their work authorizations and ability to remain in the country, unless they become eligible for some other form of protection.
As part of an effort to crack down on illegal and legal immigration, the Trump administration has attempted to remove TPS status for more than a dozen countries.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for a 6-3 court with the court’s three liberals in dissent.
Supreme Court says Trump can restart controversial asylum policy
The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to revive a controversial policy that aims to curb the number of asylum seekers processed at ports of entry.
The ruling is a major win for the president as he looks to employ as many tools as possible to carry out a sprawling immigration agenda that includes deporting record numbers of noncitizens from the US and limiting the number of migrants coming into the country.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for a 6-3 court with the liberal justices in dissent.
“We hold that an alien who is standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion.
Under immigration law, the government normally must process a migrant who shows up at a port of entry and is fleeing political, racial or religious persecution in their home country. A migrant covered under that requirement is defined as someone “who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States.”
But the metering policy enabled federal agents stationed right at the border line to turn back such asylum seekers before they ever stepped foot on US soil, frustrating their ability to be formally inspected by officials — the first step in a winding process that could eventually result in them being granted asylum. The policy was started under President Barack Obama but formalized by Trump during his first term.
Supreme Court strikes Hawaii’s "default" ban on guns on private property that’s open to the public
The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Hawaii law that banned guns on private property open to the public where the owner hadn’t explicitly condoned the carrying of firearms.
In the ruling, the conservative majority said the law — passed after a blockbuster 2022 ruling from the high court expanding gun rights — was unconstitutional.
“This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives. We hold that the law is unconstitutional,” Justice Samuel Alito said in the majority opinion.
The new ruling is a major setback for gun safety advocates who had been looking for new ways to limit the presence of guns in retail stores and in other public spaces after the 2022 Supreme Court decision that enshrined public firearm carry as a Second Amendment right.
Supreme Court tosses $1.25 million verdict for man who says Roundup caused his cancer
The Supreme Court on Thursday sided against a Missouri man who claimed that the herbicide Roundup caused his cancer, backing an argument from the product’s manufacturer that the lawsuit should have been barred because the federal government does not require a cancer warning on the label.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinion for a 7-2 court. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
Here are the pending major opinions
See the pending major cases that the justices have yet to weigh in on. And also review the status of all of the high court’s progress this term so far in CNN’s Supreme Court tracker.
It's a 6-3 court
As it navigates a charged political atmosphere during President Donald Trump’s second term and endures sharp criticism from the left and right, the court as of Tuesday has already split into conservative and liberal camps in seven decisions this year — one more than last year.
Four of the five decisions the court released Tuesday were 6-3. Those included a ruling that barred a Rastafarian man from suing prison officials who violated a federal law when they cut his dreadlocks and a decision that permitted Exxon to sue over property confiscated by the Cuban government in 1960.
The most significant 6-3 decision so far this term was the court’s April ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act’s power over redistricting disputes. The decision, and several that followed from it, helped Republicans quickly redraw congressional district in Southern states like Louisiana and Alabama to give the GOP an advantage in this year’s midterm elections.
And those numbers do not take into account rulings on the court’s emergency docket, where the liberal and conservative wings have split more frequently.
The high court, its supporters note, has decided more than half of its 46 decisions so far this term unanimously, a slightly higher share than last year by the end of June. But the biggest and most complicated decisions delivered in the final days of a term are rarely unanimous.
Read more about the 6-3 split and the missing conservative centrists.
Justices may finally debate Trump appeal of E. Jean Carroll verdict
The justices on Thursday are finally expected to discuss another case involving President Donald Trump after months of delays.
Trump is seeking to overturn a federal jury’s finding that he sexually abused and defamed magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. He appealed to the high court in November, but the justices put it on their calendar — and subsequently removed it —15 times this year.
The nation’s highest court almost never explains its handling of pending appeals and has not done so in the Carroll case. Whatever the reason, the delay has benefited Trump — in part because it has deferred a $5 million verdict a jury in New York awarded to Carroll more than three years ago.
Trump’s anti-Haitian rhetoric factored into case
Looming over the case were a history of comments President Donald Trump had made about Haiti and its people.
Those comments and similar ones from former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the official who formally revoked TPS for Haitians last year, factored into a federal judge’s decision to rule that the policy change was motivated at least in part by racial animus. That is important because if the decision to end TPS was made based on race, it would violate the equal protection clause.
During the oral arguments in the case on April 29, the court’s three-justice liberal wing zeroed in on that point as they questioned whether the administration’s decision last year was unconstitutionally discriminatory.
“We have a president say at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy,’ ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’ ‘s-hole country,’” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, said at one point to Solicitor General D. John Sauer. “And where he complained that the United States takes people from such countries instead of people from Norway, Sweden or Denmark.”
Sauer responded that the comments from Trump and Noem don’t mention race specifically.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also pressed Sauer to explain how the court was supposed to simply look past Trump’s comments when the lower court did not.
Sauer said the remarks were “made in different contexts that are remote in time” and are therefore “unilluminating” for this case.
The court’s conservatives avoided discussion of the president’s comments.
Haitian TPS holders contribute nearly $6 billion to US economy
Many Haitian TPS holders have lived in the United States for years, building careers, buying homes and having families.
They contribute an estimated $5.9 billion to the US economy, as well as pay $1.6 billion in federal, payroll, state and local taxes, according to an analysis by FWD.us, a policy and advocacy organization focused on immigration that has supported TPS for Haitians.
Nearly 190,000 Haitian TPS holders were employed in early 2025, FWD.us found. Many work in retail, hospitality, healthcare and other industries – serving as cooks and servers, stockers and packers and nursing assistants.
Florida has the largest share by far, but tens of thousands also reside in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states.
Haitian TPS holders have also revitalized some local communities, such as Springfield, Ohio, where they were the subject of attacks by Trump, who accused them in a 2024 presidential debate of eating dogs and cats.
TPS holders from Haiti and elsewhere are an important part of the US economy. Terminating TPS protections for more than 1 million immigrants from more than a dozen countries would “inflict massive harm” on the nation’s economy, according to a group of economists, led by Michael Clemens, a professor at George Mason University, who filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court.
