Tangle - Two major Supreme Court rulings on immigration.

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued two decisions on U.S. immigration policy. In the first case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court ruled 6–3 that the federal government can turn back asylum seekers before they cross into the United States. In the second, Mullin v. Doe, the Court also ruled 6–3 that courts cannot review Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determinations on groups’ eligibility for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), clearing the way for the Trump administration to remove Haitian and Syrian TPS holders from the U.S. Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Under the radar” story ⁠here⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: What do you think of each ruling? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I'm trying to untangle my brain after spending the last 72 hours parsing some very consequential Supreme Court decisions on immigration, which is our main topic today. I did take enough time off this weekend to hit up my local pool. Very, very happy to report. Public pool culture still alive and well.

High dive belly flops, tasty French fries, parades of screaming children abound. And that's going to come in handy later this week when temperatures across the East Coast, Midwest, and South are forecasted to break 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm currently trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my walk-obsessed 18-month-old boy. Woof. Anyway, we have an under-the-radar story today on student loans, some updates on the Iran War,

some breaking news with more decisions from the Supreme Court, and some local heroics involving a crow. I'm here with executive producer John Law. It's going to be a great episode. Let's get into it. Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I hear you, Isaac.

I am also trying to figure out how to stay cool in this 100-degree weather that we are going to be expecting this week. And hopefully everybody has some kind of plan, whether it's the pool, air conditioning, fans, swamp cooler, whatever your technique is. Actually, you should write in and let us know how you plan to stay cool this week. In the meantime, I've got today's quick hits for you. First up, the Supreme Court ruled five to four to uphold a Mississippi state law allowing late arriving mail-in ballots to be counted if they were postmarked by election. Day. Next, the court ruled 6 to 3 that President Donald Trump could remove Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position as federal trade commissioner. Finally, in a 5-4 decision, it ruled that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom President Trump tried to fire last year, may remain in her position as litigation

continues. Number two, U.S. officials and mediators from the Middle East said the United States in Iran had agreed to pause hostilities in this trade of her moves after several days of attacks. The sides are now reportedly discussing terms for a new round. of peace talks. Number three, the death toll from two earthquakes that impacted Venezuela last week rose to 1,450, with tens of thousands of people still missing. Number four, former national security advisor John Bolton pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized retention of national defense information. He will be sentenced on October 28th and faces a maximum of 60 months in prison. And number five, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg shared that he and his husband were

separated from their four-year-old twins for 24 hours last week after an anonymous report alleged that he posed a danger to the children. Authorities later determined the allegations were fabricated. Just this morning, huge news from the Supreme Court in Washington with the justices splitting along ideological lines, siding with the White House in some major legal disputes over President Trump's hardline immigration policies. That includes allowing the administration to remove those TPS deportation protections for thousands of Syrian and Haitian immigrants. The court also clearing a pathway for more restrictions on asylum seekers at the border.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued two decisions on U.S. immigration policy. In the first case, Mullins v. El Otrolado, the court ruled six to three that the federal government can turn back asylum seekers before they cross into the United States. In the second, Mullen v. Doe, the court also ruled six to three that courts cannot review Department of Homeland Security determinations on groups' eligibility for temporary protected status, clearing the way for the Trump administration to remove Haitian and Syrian TPS holders from the U.S. For context, roughly 10 years ago, under President Barack Obama, customs and border officers adopted a policy called metering, in which they turned back non-citizens, including asylum

seekers, at the U.S.-Mexico border, before they could physically cross into the United States. The plaintiffs alleged this policy violated federal law, allowing any person who arrives in the United States to access the asylum process, arguing arrival at U.S. ports of entry falls under that provision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cited with the plaintiffs, ruling that asylum seekers who arrived at ports of entry had functionally arrived in the country. The majority struck down that decision. Justice Samuel Alito wrote, in ordinary speech, no one would say that a person arrives in a place, for example, a house, a city, or a country, before that person enters that place. Later adding, a running back does not arrive in the end zone when he reaches the one-yard line.

He also noted that Congress could have specified that asylum seekers arriving at the border should have their claims heard, but it did not. The courts three Democratic-appointed justices dissented, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded directly to several of Alito's conclusions. It would not be premature to say someone arrives in San Francisco while still driving on the Golden Gate Bridge. The meanings of the phrases arrives in and arriving in depend on context, she wrote. separately, Sotomayor argued that the decision creates a perverse incentive because asylum seekers will now seek to enter the U.S. illegally in order to have their claims heard. Congress established the temporary protected status program for citizens of countries impacted by natural disaster, armed conflict, or other extraordinary and temporary situations.

Obama administration DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano gave the designation to Haiti in 2010, following a devastating earthquake, and gave the designation to Syria in 2012 amid then-President Bashar al-Assad's violent crackdown on dissent. Those designations, which last up to 18 months at a time, were repeatedly extended until 2025, when then DHS Secretary Cristino moved to end both. Groups of Haitian and Syrian nationals challenged the decision and asked the court to block their removal from the country, while those challenges played out in the lower courts. Justice Alito, again writing for the majority, held that the law creating TPS does not permit judicial review

of a DHS decision to terminate TPS for a group. The term determination can be used to describe either an individual decision or the whole process leading to the final decision, he wrote. Alito also rejected the plaintiff's claims that the Trump administration's decision to end the designation was motivated by racial animus, acknowledging heated language used by President Donald Trump about Haitian migrants, but finding that Nome could have plausibly made her decision for a litany

of policy-related reasons. The courts three Democratic-appointed justices again dissented. Justice Elena Kagan argued that federal law does allow judicial review of certain aspects of the TPS determination, like the procedural steps the secretary must undertake prior to making any determination about country conditions. She also suggested that the Haitian plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their argument that racism was a motivating factor in the determination, violating equal protection under the Constitution. Today, we'll share views from the right and the left on these immigration rulings, and then Isaac's take.

We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. First up, let's start with what the right is saying. The right mostly supports the rulings, with many arguing that the court upheld the intent of the law. Some say the decisions rectify judicial intrusions into executive authority. Others say the majority erred by discounting racial animus in the TPS case. The Washington Examiner Editorial Board wrote, The Supreme Court just made securing the border easier. The court held that temporary protected status is indeed temporary,

and that an alien is not in the United States till they are in the United States. These simple declarations that words mean what they say, and that statutory limits must be enforced as written, will make it easier for future presidents to preserve the border security Trump has achieved, the board said. Open borders activists claim that as soon as an alien intending to enter, the U.S. encounters a U.S. official at the border, even if that alien is still in Mexico, that should qualify under the statute as arriving in the U.S.

writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito was having none of it. For too long, lower federal courts have treated immigration statuses not as law to be enforced, but as invitations to impose open border policies that Congress refused to enact. Presidents cannot secure the border if judges are free to redefine in to mean outside or temporary to mean permanent, the board wrote. The Supreme Court restored the ordinary meaning of those words and with it a principle of self-governance. Immigration law is written by Congress and enforced by the president,

not rewritten by district court judges at the behest of activist groups. In the New York Post, Ilya Shapiro said presidential power Trump's leftist lawfare. President Donald Trump has pushed the envelope of his authority. The court has generally let him do so, except as in the tariffs case, when he treads on clear congressional prerogatives, wrote. The court in Mullen v. Elotrolado found that an alien standing in Mexico does not arrive in the United States by attempting and failing to set foot in this country. That's important

because the Immigration and Nationality Act gives the right to apply for asylum only to aliens who are in the country, a requirement that lower court judges were looking to thwart. The Democratic-appointed justices proved unwilling to defer to executive determinations, even those made under the discretion outlined in the INA's text. Each time, they supported legal challenges, they were actually policy disagreement, Shapiro said. But it's not up to the courts to make immigration determinations. Whether you like what this or any other administration does in the immigration space, Congress has legislated for good or ill in a way that gives expansive power to the executive branch here. In the Washington Post, George F. Will

argued the Supreme Court errs. in this immigration rule. DHS Secretary Christine Ome's behavior egregiously violated the pertinent law, but was shielded by judicial. rebuke by the court majority's to mechanical textualism about the secretary's determination meaning decision, and by a blinkered non-recognition of the animus behind Noam's action, Will, wrote, the law required Noam to review conditions in Haiti after consulting with appropriate government agencies, note the plural. Instead, she made her decision then conducted a make-believe consultation. Noam was implementing the president's proclaimed animus even against immigrants who are in America legally, but whom he considers Icky. Kagan says,

prior court rulings establish that the Haitians needed to show only that a racially discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor, emphasis added, in the termination of Haiti's TPS designation, Will said. Well, Nome's former employer has said Haitians were eating Ohio pets. Was race on the president's mind? Donald Trump has clarified this. Why is it we only take people from shithole countries like Haiti and Somalia? Why can't we have some people from Norway and Sweden? All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left strongly opposes both rulings, with many saying the TPS decision was legally and morally wrong. Others question Alito's textualist analysis in the asylum case. Still, others say the laws at the root of the decisions must be changed. In the New York Times, O'Lora Mukherjee called the TPS decision a slap in the face to immigrants who followed the law. Lawyers for the plaintiffs had argued in April that courts have an obligation to ensure that the TPS termination decision is not based on whims or racist ideology. In conclusion, considering the challenge to the termination for TPS for Syria on November 18, 2025,

federal district court Judge Catherine Polkfela noted that all the Trump administration terminations have involved non-European majority non-white population, Bookerji wrote. Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent that Donald Trump had repeatedly used repellent and racially inflected statements regarding immigrants, notoriously insisting Haitians are eating dogs and baselessly commenting that Haitians in America could have AIDS. The dissent further warned of the devastation that will result as TPS holders are put on the next plane back to Haiti or Syria. TPS holders nationwide have been bracing for the worst, and now it's here. Family separations, loss of employment and deportations.

In both Syria and Haiti, there is a risk of terrorism, kidnapping, and armed conflict, Mukachit said. As far off as it may seem, congressional action is now the only way forward. Any new TPS statute should explicitly provide for judicial review of termination decisions, effectively overruling Thursday's devastating Supreme Court decision. In Slate, Robin Nicole Sanders said Alito's textualism has entered the realm of absurd. The question before the court in the asylum case was whether someone standing at an official port of entry on the Mexican side of the border has already arrived, or whether a rival occurs only after physically crossing onto American soil. The court chose the latter.

Under that reading, until an asylum seeker takes that final step, the government's statutory obligation to inspect the person and begin the asylum process never arises, Sanders wrote. The majority acknowledges that its reading creates some overlap in the statute, but concludes that a modest amount of redundancy is preferable to giving words an unnatural meaning. Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent points toward an alternative reading. Rather than treating arrives in the United States as a freestanding phrase, she reads it alongside the statute's repeated mandatory commands. Congress provided that immigration officers shall inspect arriving non-citizens and shall refer those expressing a fear of persecution into the asylum process,

Sanders said. Congress did not establish a system in which executive officials could decide through physical positioning alone whether those mandatory duties would ever arise. It established a process designed to ensure that people presenting themselves for admission at the designated ports of entry would first be inspected before the government decided whether they could enter, should be removed, or allowed to pursue asylum. That reading is no one. less textual. America Magazine's editors suggested the rulings reveal a profound moral failure. Regarding Haitian TPS holders in particular, the court's ruling would mean returning more than

300,000 people to a country dominated by gang violence largely without a functioning government, to which Americans are warned against traveling and to whose capital city American commercial airlines are forbidden to fly, the editors said. In the second case, the court allowed the administration to close the country to asylum seekers. Effectively, the court decided that the administration can refuse to allow immigrants to arrive in the legally relevant sense at ports of entry, thus turning them away before they can even present a case for asylum under U.S. law. The results of these decisions, whether or not they are illegal and constitutional, are profoundly immoral and unjust. They betray the United States history as a country of immigrants and are

a wound on the American conscience, the editor wrote. If the law requires allowing an administration to deport hundreds of thousands of people into moral peril, after it has attacked them with vile and racist lies, then justice demands that the law be reformed. If the Constitution is to be interpreted to allow the president to determine in advance that effectively no one is eligible for asylum, no matter what laws Congress has passed, then the Constitution needs to be amended to strengthen the separation of powers that safeguards American liberty and self-governance. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.

All right, that is it for with the left and the writer saying, which brings us to my take. Whenever I talk about Supreme Court rulings, I try to separate my thoughts into two buckets, the logic of the legal arguments and the practical outcomes of the ruling. I'll do that again today for both of these cases. Let's start with the asylum case. On the merits, Justice Alito's legal rationale mostly makes sense to me. His argument about the plain English meaning of arrives in resonates, and his interpretation is reasonably applied here.

As he noted, in his opinion, immigration law frequently distinguishes between actual entrance into the U.S. and attempted entrance. So it's fair to conclude that if Congress had wanted every asylum seeker who reached a point of entry to be able to apply for asylum, it would have said so expressly. But Alito's several analogies for this distinction, such as a running back reaching the one-yard line of the end zone versus actually stepping into the end zone, didn't sit quite right with me. I'd put it more like this. If I were invited over to a friend's house for dinner, pulled up onto the street in front of their house, and parked and then called to say I've arrived, I would find it supremely odd if that friend said,

no, you didn't. You're on the street. Call me when you're at the front door. But if I said, I've arrived in your house, then that would be odd, given that I was on the street. I might quibble with Alito's analogies, but I think the gist of his point is sound. On the other hand, civil rights attorney Robin Nicole Sanders, writing in Slate under what the left

is saying, made a great argument that Alito's analysis missed the full context of Congress's intent for the asylum system. As she noted, Congress laid out clear instructions for immigration officers when someone arrives in the United States, and the context of those instructions was obviously for ports of entry. The broader statute that contains this precise wording does seem to imply that Congress is making rules for what to do when someone shows up at a port of entry, not just when someone crosses into U.S. territory at a port of entry. These semantic, hair-splitting debates underscore the court's important role in resolving legal questions that hinge on a word or two. Nothing about the majority's decision feels egregiously out

of bounds to me. In fact, on the strict interpretation of the law, I think it's how I would have ended up voting myself. This is the law. I want it to be technical, tight, straightforward. And in that sense, I think it's very fair to hold the line that arrives in means literally arriving in the United States, as Alito defines it. However, the impact of this ruling worries me. Our asylum system is broken, and metering is an effective way to slow things down. In 2024, when I laid out my bipartisan solution to fixing the immigration system, I put tightening the asylum system atop the list of Republican-led ideas I would support.

Any non-citizen, including economic migrants, can currently cross the border illegally and immediately turn themselves in for processing as asylum seekers, and we have to grant them a hearing. Most end up not qualifying once their claims are actually heard, yet this system acts as a gigantic loophole for migrants who want to come here illegally, and spend years inside the U.S. before their claims are heard, some disappearing within the country once they're inside. I want to fix that problem, but this ruling might make it worse.

Now, rather than show up at legal ports of entry, how many more migrants will attempt to cross illegally? And how much disorganization and instability will that inject into the system? All of this means that unless Congress rewrites or amends the law, different administrations will explicitly be able to stop different people from entering at ports of entry rather than uniformly executing enforcement. That, too, feels like a bad outcome right for disorganization and chaos. My feelings about the temporary protected status or TPS case were even more mixed.

At the base level, it would be odd if one Department of Homeland Security Secretary could create and repeatedly extend TPS designations, but another couldn't end them. TPS designations for Haitian and Syrian migrants were first made in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Supposed to last for 18 months, they were repeatedly extended until last year, making a mockery of the word temporary. Ultimately, if former DHS Secretary Christine Noem has determined that these TPS designations are no longer necessary or no longer serve the interests of the United States, she seems well within her legal authority to end them. Making determinations about these programs is literally the DHS secretary's job. But this case raises a few core legal

questions and they created a mess for the court. One question is whether courts can actually review the determination of the DHS Secretary. This seems straightforward. The TPS statute bars judicial review of any determination of the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the designation or termination or extension of a designation of a foreign state. I'm not sure how much clear it can get, even if I find it absurd that we created a non-court reviewable law. This should be changed immediately, less than be further abused by this administration and future ones. But the challengers' claim was slightly different. They argued that while they cannot challenge the substance of Noam's decision, they can challenge the procedure she took to get there. It's sort of akin to saying, yes, I had the drugs on

me, but I was illegally searched, so the charges should be thrown out. It turns out that Noam, whose incompetence I warned about the moment she was nominated, took a quintessentially incompetent path to get to her decision. She did not adequately consult the appropriate agencies, the State Department, about conditions in Syria or Haiti to make her determination as required by law. Rather than dispute whether her single email exchange with the State Department official for each country constituted a legal review, Alito simply said that the TPS judicial review bar expressly restricts review. He seems right, though again, the law's language seems absurd, and it also appears that Noam genuinely violated procedural rules to get to her conclusion.

It is a beautiful concoction of incompetence, bad law, and inelastic jurisprudence. Elito also concluded that a constitutional challenge to the termination of Haiti's designation on the grounds that termination was racially motivated would likely fail. To his credit, he notes that poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character and there is no justification for denigrating the character of Haitians who suffer from and bear no responsibility for their country's ills, end quote. Still, I think the challengers had their best argument on this point. Most of us know the comments by heart now,

though Justice Kagan helpfully listed them from the bench. Trump has suggested Haitians living in the United States were poisoning the blood of America, that Haitians probably have AIDS, that they're eating the dogs and cats, that allowing them in is like a death wish for our country. He is also mused about why we only take people from shithole countries like Haiti and Somalia and not more from Norway and Sweden. Alito's suggestion that none of

these statements were overtly racial or that they could rest on reasons that have nothing to do with race is to me, farcical. I'm not particularly sensitive about these things in an era where far too much is chalked up to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ableism, etc. But come on. Trump has used dehumanizing language specifically and repeatedly about Haiti and black majority countries, while other countries, with majority white people and genuine, if lesser instability and corruption, get diplomatic courtship, business deals, and silence. We don't have to be 100% certain that Trump is racist to make an evidentiary argument that he has racial animosity towards Haitians. And the law doesn't require race to be the sole or dominant cause of action, only a motivating factor.

Short of Trump standing up and saying, I don't want Haitians here because they are black, I'm not sure what would qualify. And frankly, quote, they're poisoning the blood of our country, end quote, is pretty damn close. So, now what? The practical implication is that hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians who have been living here

could be forced to go back to their countries or forced into hiding to avoid deportation. Remember, this ruling grants DHS the authority to NTPS for these groups, but it is yet to do so. Meanwhile, a future Democratic administration could say issue a 50-year TPS for any country of its liking, and that is apparently not something any court can review,

no matter how incompetently it is done. Even on the heels of an admittedly complex set of legal questions, this outcome seems quite bad, and without congressional intervention, the downstream effects of it will be felt long past the Trump administration. All right, that is it for my take. We have a staff dissent today from Associate Editor Lindsay Canuth, so I'm going to pass it over to her,

and then it's back to John for the rest of the pod. Thanks, Isaac. This is Associate Editor Lindsay Canuth with a staff dissent. Like Isaac, I want the law to be technical, tight, and straightforward. But for me, that compass pointed away from the majority's decision in the asylum case. The parenthetical and the relevant statute reads, An alien who arrives in the United States, whether or not at a designated port of arrival,

shall be deemed for purposes of this chapter and applicant for admission. That parenthetical seems to clearly designate ports of entry as a form of arriving in the country, and therefore as places where agents must screen for asylum claims. So in reading arrives in the U.S. to mean present in the U.S., a phrase that already comes immediately before the arrives in clause, I agree with Justice Sonia Sotomayor that the majority created redundancy where there was clarity. Thank you, and I'll pass it back to John for the rest of today's story. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Thank you. Thanks, Lindsay. Here's your under the radar story for today, folks. Several changes to the federal student loan system passed under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will take effect, including a reduction in the number of loan repayment program options and the end of the Biden administration's saving on a valuable education plan. New borrowers will have two repayment options, a tiered or an income-based plan, and borrowing limits for certain graduate students will be lowered. Meanwhile, people on the save plan, which offered more affordable income-based repayment options will have 90 days to apply for a new plan. Axios has a breakdown of the changes,

and you can check that out with a link in today's episode description. And last but not least, our Have a Nice Day story. Initially, Leah Wilson had no idea why the sky above her house was full of crows. Then she and her neighbors discovered that a crow had become stuck in her home's gutter. She enlisted the help of the local fire department to save the bird. then drove it to a wild animal rehabilitation center. A few days later, the center told her that the crow had been released back into the wild, but that wasn't the end of the story.

When walking her dog around the neighborhood, Wilson says a crow swooped down and dropped a feathered bundle at her feet. Since then, crows have left her more than a half dozen items, and they often join her on her walks with her dog. CP24 has this story, and you can check that out with the link in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. If you'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com, where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets to a discount on both.

We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman

with senior editor Will Kobach and associate. editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saw. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To run more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at readtangle.com.