The U.S. Supreme Court opens its nine-month term next Monday with a case that could make oil companies, including ExxonMobil, financially liable for helping drive climate change. The justices may soon take up cases on immigrant detention, prediction-market regulation and a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Each tests how far government power reaches and who gets to exercise it.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. It typically hears arguments in about 70 cases a term and has already agreed to hear about two dozen. The justices are still weighing a host of other petitions and were expected to announce some decisions this week.
Detention Without Bond
The Trump administration wants the court to let it keep detaining people arrested in the president's immigration crackdown without giving them a chance to seek bond. Some have lived in the United States for years.
The dispute turns on a statutory phrase. Federal law subjects "applicants for admission" to mandatory detention while their cases proceed in immigration courts, making them ineligible for bond hearings. Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the position that non-U.S. citizens already living in the country—not just people arriving at the border—qualify as applicants for admission. That departed from a long-standing interpretation of immigration law.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the Justice Department, adopted ICE's reading. Immigration judges employed by the department then began ordering mandatory detention.
The administration has struggled in the lower courts. Kemal Hepsen, an immigration lawyer in Texas, said federal appeals courts have fully considered the issue and the administration has lost 9 of 11 decisions. "On the statutory question, there's nothing left to percolate, and the alternative is a country where whether you can get bond depends on which state ICE drives you to," Hepsen said.
Prediction Markets and the States
A second possible case could shape a fast-growing industry. Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket have seen explosive growth. Appeals involving Kalshi, Crypto.com and Robinhood, which have expanded into the space, are before the court.
Operators describe their "event contracts" as financial derivatives that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency, should regulate exclusively. A bipartisan coalition of states counters that sports-related offerings amount to gambling and fall under state sports-betting laws. Federal appeals courts disagree. The Trump administration has backed the prediction markets in the litigation, and Polymarket secured an investment last year from a venture capital firm backed by Donald Trump Jr., the president's son.
The cost of losing is concrete. If the justices decide prediction markets are gambling, the platforms could face bans, taxes, licensing regimes and criminal statutes that vary from state to state.
Daniel Wallach, a Florida sports lawyer who has followed the litigation, said Supreme Court intervention is likely at some point. "The stakeholder interest in this controversy encompasses 50 states, hundreds of Native American tribes, hundreds of casinos, multi-billion-dollar financial exchanges, online sports betting companies and the federal government," Wallach said. "This probably is the most expansive and significant group of stakeholders that you could imagine for almost any case."
Ten Commandments in Texas Classrooms
Several Texas families, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, have asked the court to strike down the state's 2025 law requiring public elementary and high schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. They are appealing a ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the law violates neither the First Amendment's bar on government establishment of religion nor its protection for free exercise.
Chloe Kempf, a lawyer at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement: "Our nation's bedrock principle of separating church and state means that families and faith communities — not politicians — get to decide what role religion plays in children's lives."
Judge Kyle Duncan, writing for the 5th Circuit, saw it differently. "The Texas law does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis or imams," he wrote. "It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason."
The court struck down a similar Kentucky law in its 1980 decision, Stone v. Graham. But the justices discarded the legal framework behind that ruling in 2022, when they sided with a public high school football coach in Washington state. He had been suspended for refusing to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games. The current court has taken an expansive view of religious freedom.
Republican-led Southern states have driven the push. Louisiana passed a classroom requirement in 2024, followed by Arkansas, Texas and Alabama. Critics portray the laws as part of rising Christian nationalism. Louisiana's law also faces challenges, and the state wants the justices to consider it if they take up the Texas case. In February, the 5th Circuit let Louisiana's measure take effect but said it needed more information on implementation before it could rule on the law's constitutionality.
Why This Matters:
These cases ask who holds authority: federal agencies, states or courts. On detention, the administration's reading of a statute has lost in most appeals courts, and a ruling would settle whether bond depends on the statute's text or where someone is held. On prediction markets, the outcome decides whether one federal regulator oversees a fast-growing industry or 50 states write their own rules, with real costs for investors, exchanges and consumers. On the Ten Commandments, the justices may revisit how much room states and local communities have to shape religious expression in public schools. From a limited-government view, each case raises the same question: whether the power being used sits where the law actually puts it.