The Supreme Court moved quickly Thursday to hand down major opinions, including two immigration wins for President Donald Trump, and one of those rulings would let the Trump administration block people from applying for asylum at the southern border. The clash over that decision spilled into public view as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, directly challenging a majority opinion that she said would cost lives.
Who Gets Crushed
Sotomayor traced the difficult journey many asylum seekers face and tied the court’s ruling to a painful chapter in U.S. history, when the United States and other countries turned back a ship full of Jewish refugees trying to flee persecution in Nazi Germany in 1939. About 250 of those passengers later died in the Holocaust. In her dissent, Sotomayor said the majority’s opinion would allow the Trump administration to block people from applying for asylum at the border, which she said would result in more deaths. She said the decision “regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
The case was announced after conservative Justice Samuel Alito finished reading the majority opinion from the bench. Justice Brett Kavanaugh watched Sotomayor intently as she spoke, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson looked straight ahead. Majority opinions are always read from the bench and dissenters can speak up as well to underscore their objections, though that typically happens in only a few cases each term. Additional rulings are expected on Monday.
What They Call Order
Alito said the case was about whether the law allows border officials to delay asylum seekers’ entry into the U.S. “until they can be processed in a safe and orderly way,” not about the wisdom of the policy itself. He said the policy at the center of the case had been used under both the Obama and Trump administrations and added, “I won’t add anything more to that.”
Sotomayor’s spoken dissent appeared to surprise Alito. In a very rare move, he spoke off the cuff and said he would have added more detail to his summary if he had known about plans to speak. The confusion turned out to be a misunderstanding on Alito’s part; Sotomayor’s chambers had passed along word of her plan. The exchange exposed the court’s polished ritual for what it is: a tightly managed display of authority, with the people most affected by the ruling absent from the bench while the justices debate their fate in public.
The Court’s Busy Season of Power
The exchange came during the court’s busiest time of the year, as the justices prepare to release opinions next week on some of the biggest issues of the term and Trump’s presidency so far, including his push to restrict birthright citizenship and expand the president’s power to fire board members at independent agencies. The court’s decisions are landing fast, and the targets are familiar: migrants, agency officials, and anyone caught under the machinery of executive power.
The justices have spoken publicly about their cordial working relationships and regular lunches as a group where they set aside cases to talk and share each other’s company. Although there are ideological splits between the court’s conservative majority and its liberal wing, they also decide many cases unanimously, including one this month about the Second Amendment rights of marijuana users. The language of collegiality sits alongside the reality of a court that keeps deciding who gets to move, stay, work, or be removed under rules set far above the people living with the consequences.
Still, it is not the first time unusual tensions have surfaced this term. Sotomayor issued a rare public apology in April to Justice Brett Kavanaugh for what she called “hurtful comments.” She had said during a law school talk that a colleague “probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” In another public appearance in March, Kavanaugh and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sparred over the many emergency orders the court had issued allowing Trump to move ahead with key parts of his agenda. The court’s public disagreements may be rare, but the power it wields over ordinary people is not.