Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has delivered a blistering rebuke of her conservative colleagues— telling them to their faces that “more people will die”— after they sided with the Trump administration to turn back asylum seekers at the border.
And in a separate case, fellow liberal justice Elena Kagan also lashed at the court for allowing Donald Trump to end deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians - even using his “repellent” comments about Haitians eating cats and dogs as part of her dissent.
Thursday’s Supreme Court decisions handed Trump a pair of major victories that could reshape immigration policy for years to come.
In the first 6-3 ruling, the court held that migrants waiting at ports of entry on the Mexican side of the southern border have not legally “arrived in the United States” and therefore are not entitled to statutory inspection and asylum-processing requirements.
But in a furious dissent read from the bench as her colleagues watched, Sotomayor accused the court of effectively creating a roadmap for future administrations to evade asylum laws altogether simply by preventing migrants from stepping onto U.S. soil. Reading a dissent is the most pointed possible show of disapproval open to justices.
“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die.”
The decision effectively upholds the legal foundation of the “metering” policies used during President Donald Trump’s first administration, under which Customs and Border Protection officials limited how many migrants could present asylum claims at official crossings each day.
But under the court’s reasoning, Sotomayor argued, “so long as the noncitizens are kept one inch away from U.S. soil, the Government has no duty to inspect them or accept their asylum applications.”
The liberal justice also invoked the history of Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis, the ship turned away from safe harbor before many passengers later perished in the Holocaust, arguing that modern refugee protections were designed to prevent similar failures.
“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.
In the second case, the six conservative justices allowed the administration to move forward with terminating Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants while litigation continues.
But Kagan, joined by Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that lifting the injunction would immediately expose hundreds of thousands of people to the risk of deportation and loss of work authorization, creating harms that could not easily be undone if the challengers ultimately won.
She also invoked Trump’s own shocking words, writing that: “The Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
“So here are some of those statements,” Kagan continued. “‘Haitians are “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.”And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. I And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”
The rulings delivered one of the biggest legal wins of Trump’s second term, reinforcing his authority to crack down on both asylum seekers and migrants already living in the United States under humanitarian protections.
The decisions also give MAGA Republicans a powerful political talking point ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“MASSIVE WIN,” wrote MAGA podcaster Tim Pool on X.
“Great news for the dogs and cats of Springfield,” Katie Miller, the wife of Trump aide Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s deportation strategy.
