What A Day - SCOTUS: Don't Give US Your Huddled Masses

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

As so many World Cup fans are discovering ranch dressing and enjoying their visits to the U.S., the Supreme Court left a very different message for people who come to the U.S. for safety and protection: leave. In two 6-3 decisions today, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump Administration can block asylum seekers at the border and withdraw deportation protections from immigrants fleeing violence and war in their home countries. For more on how the Court’s decisions will shape future U.S. immigration policy, we spoke to Andrea Flores. She’s a former Homeland Security official under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and the founder of Securing America’s Promise, a pro-immigration newsletter.And in headlines, the White House formally requests $87.6 billion mostly to replenish the Pentagon , what the U.S. is doing to help after deadly earthquakes in Venezuela, and a new AP-NORC survey says most Americans are inundated with scam attempts on a daily basis. But you probably already knew that — just check your texts.Show Notes: Check out Andrea's work – securingamericaspromise.substack.com Support Venezuela – https://tinyurl.com/426wdfpj Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

As long as Trump is in power, and as long as Stephen Miller is in his White House, we don't have two parties thinking about how to fix the immigration system. We have one party that's trying to remove as many immigrants as possible, and then we have one party that doesn't have a clear answer yet. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Wetter Day, the show that can't figure out why so many artists refuse to perform at the definitely non-partisan Freedom 250 Great American State Fair, which was again, Definitely not intended just for supporters of President Donald Trump.

See, here's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explaining just how nonpartisan it is. Okay, to start this off, I think we have to give a big round of applause for our military band and singers way better than those libtards that canceled on us. So much better. Thank you guys. But don't worry. that dozens of people in attendance also got to enjoy the musical stylings of Alexis Wilkins, better known as FBI Director Cash Patel's girlfriend.

On today's show, we talk about the Supreme Court's crackdown on immigration with former Homeland Security and White House official Andrea Flores. Before we get into all that, here's what we're following today, Thursday, June 25th. Nobody wants to be the president of Iran right now because they know they'll get their heads blown off if they don't do the right thing. This president has scared the living daylights out of Iran, and we're going to, I believe we will get a deal that brings peace to the Middle East. Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott's logic is blowing people's heads off in the name of peace. Do you really believe what you're saying, Rick? Well, no peace as of yet.

But the White House has now formally requested $87.6 billion, mostly to replenish the Pentagon after the U.S. attacked Iran for reasons. The Office of Management and Budget sent Congress the supplemental spending request Wednesday. The majority of the money is to cover expenses incurred by the Defense Department as part of Operation Epic Fury. It also allocates $11.1 billion to support American farmers, $1.4 billion for the Ebola virus outbreak in Central Africa, and $500 million to support the ongoing efforts, quote, to complete restoration and construction projects in and around Washington, D.C. You know, Trump's real priority.

3,900 children were separated from their family. 450,000 kids were lost. Mr. Secretary, Mr. Secretary, do not interrupt. Don't you point your finger at me. I will point my finger at you. Don't you be a hypocrite then. You should be as upset about the 450,000 kids that were lost. You didn't say a word about it.

For four years, you never said a word. Mr. Secretary. Could you put him in his place for, for. You should be putting your place. Sheesh. If you ever wonder why the government can't get shit done, that's your answer. Things get testy between Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen and Connecticut Democratic Representative Rosa DeLoro during a House Appropriations Committee hearing today. Aside from repeatedly bringing up the Biden administration,

Mullen told the committee that his department is reevaluating the 11 warehouses purchased under XDHS Barbie Christy Nome to use his immigration detention facilities. When Mullen came into office, he paused any new purchases, and according to the New York Times, federal officials have been looking at ways to offload some of them. During the hearing, Mullen said some of the warehouses just, quote, probably won't work and suggested a lack of, quote, due diligence when it came to purchasing them. If there's a bus somewhere, Mullen is throwing no munder it. I had an opportunity to talk earlier this morning with Elsie Rodriguez, the acting president.

We're obviously awaiting the... We're already deploying search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles. There'll be some others we'll add. That's their most immediate need right now is search and rescue efforts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters how the U.S. is responding to deadly earthquakes in Venezuela. The South American country was hit by two powerful earthquakes overnight, killing at least 180 people with hundreds of people still missing. The quakes, measuring 7.2 and 7.5, were centered in the country's northernmost states, and the country will likely experience aftershocks over the next few days. In response, the United Nations announced that it has deployed urban search and rescue teams to Venezuela,

and the Trump administration sent a regional disaster assistance response team alongside search and rescue teams to provide support. If you're interested in helping the people of Venezuela recover from the quakes, we've put a link to some resources in the show notes. If someone's calling you in the year 2026, it's probably a scammer. According to a new AP Nork survey, most Americans are inundated by scam attempts on a daily basis. But I'm sure you didn't need a poll to tell you that. Just check your call log. I just got one walking into the studio. 58% of U.S. adults surveyed said they receive text messages, phone calls, emails, online messages, or online advertisements that they suspect are scams every single day. The poll, which was conducted in February, also found that about three in ten Americans have lost money or personal information to scam.

I guess that's your sign to sit back, relax, and turn your phone on Do Not Disturb, at least for the remainder of our show. And that's the news. Let's talk about immigration in the U.S. As you probably know by now, I've been loving the World Cup, especially the scenes of foreign visitors enjoying our ranch dressing, breakfast chain restaurants, and more seriously, the general kindness and welcoming attitude of everyday Americans. It's been, in all honesty, extremely nice to see. But those World Cup visitors could afford tickets, flights, and hotels. And today, the Supreme Court left a very different message for people who come to the U.S. for safety and protection. Leave. In two six to three decisions, the court ruled that the Trump administration

can block asylum seekers at the border and withdraw deportation protections from immigrants fleeing violence and war in their home countries. In short, while so many people are enjoying visits to the U.S., the court says that the people who need our country most may not be able to stay. So for more on how the court's decisions will shape U.S. immigration policy, I spoke to Andrea Flores. She's a former Homeland Security official under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the founder of Securing America's Promise, a pro-immigration newsletter. Andrea, welcome back to what a day. Thanks for having me back.

The Supreme Court made two major immigration decisions today, ruling, on the Trump administration's changes to the U.S. policy on asylum and the Trump administration's deportation protections policies. Can you walk us through these decisions? Yes. So the first one is a case about an asylum policy that was used under the Obama administration. But I used to serve in the Obama administration. And it's about something called metering where border patrol officers at ports of entry would turn back asylum seekers before they could get to the United States to claim asylum. And so what this court essentially said is that it is okay essentially for the government to continue to do that. But it's a bit of an odd case. I just want to say for listeners,

you know, this involves an asylum restriction from 2016 when right now asylum at the border is unilaterally suspended. And if I remember correctly, the Biden administration withdrew that policy in 2021, but the Trump administration wanted to bring it back. Is that correct? That's right. So when I was serving in the Biden White House in 2021, we knew metering was not an effective tool to manage the border at that point. But essentially, yes, President Trump wanted to bring it back, even though there are not a lot of asylum seekers at the border right now, but they are just trying to unilaterally end asylum as we know it. So they're fighting this sort of almost old policy. They don't even need on a day-to-day basis because they are deporting anyone who tries to seek asylum at the border. This is a completion of a longer case, but it really opens the door to like, what on earth will Congress do with asylum policy? Because each president, they like suspend it, ban it, temporarily pause it. And we've just been going that way now, really since the Obama administration. So it's a little bit more, I mean, it will impact as many people as case number two,

which is about temporary protected status, which there are 1.3 million people with TPS protections living and working in the United States today, and the court decided that the president has the authority to terminate their legal status without judicial review from the courts, opening the door for what a lot of people are calling the biggest de-legalization of immigrants we've seen in modern history. We'll get back to my conversation with Andrea Flores

in a moment to talk about what the court's decisions mean for the future of immigration in the U.S. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come atter some ads. This podcast is sponsored by Casper. Casper makes reliable, high-quality mattresses designed to deliver consistent, comfortable sleep night after night. Casper's mattresses are highly rated by Consumer Reports, and out of 99 mattresses, consumer reports, named Casper's The One mattress, their top-rated all-foam mattress of 2026.

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Right now, save up to 30% on mattresses and up to 35% on everything else when you go to casper.com. One last time, that's C-A-S-P-E-E-E-A. and save up to 30% on the mattress you deserve. Water Day is brought to you by Mill. We've had our Mill food recycler in our office kitchen for a few months now, and I still haven't gotten over how it's made the act of throwing food away simpler, cleaner, and better for the planet.

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We can just put our banana peels and lunch scraps into it, and that's it. No mess, no smell, and we're doing something for the planet on a daily basis. Try Mill risk-free for 90 days and get $75 off at mill.com slash wad. That's $75 off at mill.com slash wad. Let's get back to my conversation with Andrea Flores. So how will both of these decisions impact U.S. immigration policy in practice? I know that they're quite different and one impacts people who haven't even gotten here yet. But what does this mean for immigration?

For the asylum case, it means that asylum law is barely surviving this administration, right? They've already suspended it at the border, and now they can just physically block the few people who may even still make it to the border and still have some procedural right to seek protection. So that impacts people, as you said, who haven't arrived. The second case actually impacts a population in some cases of people who have been here since the 1990s. They have a lot of TPS holders. So say if you have TPS and you're from El Salvador, you've been here for three decades or more. And if you are from Haiti, you may have been holding TPS now since 2010.

These are really long-established immigrant communities who are living and working in American businesses. They've gotten married. They have kids. I mean, the 1.3 million doesn't even impact all of the ties that they have to our communities. and I think it's important for people to realize that TPS holders contribute $6 billion of revenue to the American economy per year. So it's a stunning decision. I'm still processing it myself as an immigration expert because it's opposite of how immigration law should work. Most presidents try and make more people legal immigrants.

Now we have a president who wants to grow the number of undocumented immigrants in order to deport them by going after this very long established bipartisan protection. And I don't know if you were as struck by this, but in the majority opinion in that decision, the conservative justices basically said like, oh, Trump's statements about, for instance, Haitians weren't racist. They didn't have anything to do with racial animus. And you look at the minority opinions and they point out how he talked about how Haitians bring AIDS and are living in shithole countries. It was just a real like, we're looking at the same thing and the conservative justices are like, doesn't mean anything to me. I mean, these conservative justices, and we saw this at the voting rights cases, will do anything but acknowledge racism on its face. Like, it's just so consistent since they gutted the Voting Rights Act and in their immigration cases, you could not be more textually racist than what President Trump has said about Haitians. And, you know, his Solicitor General and the arguments didn't even repeat those statements that he said. None of the justices repeated those statements.

Why? Because they're extremely racist. And so that's why it's hard to believe. You know, they did create one exception. They said a court could review a constitutional claim about TPS being revoked. But if they already communicated out to every court that what Trump has said about Haitians is not racist, I don't know what kind of constitutional claim could protect TPS holders from having their legal status revoked and from them being deported. So we are almost at the end of the Supreme Court term, which feels like it began 3,000 years ago. but there are still a few big cases that have not been decided, including the challenge to the

constitutional right to birthright citizenship. I know that reading tea leaves sucks, but what do you think the court is going to do in that case? So reading, you know, Chief Justice Roberts' strategy for many terms now as a lawyer, he seems to like to pair something really controversial and bad with something that seems like really institutionalist and fair and neutral, right? And so I suspect to was the far more radical, far-reaching de-legalization of 1.3 million people, and that we will likely see Roberts' choose birthright to say, we decide against the administration, you can't amend the Constitution with executive order, which is what he's trying to do, and this is well-settled law.

Now, you're right, predicting things really is the worst because this court has made some pretty radical decisions this term, going back to Calais and voting rights and this TPS decision. So I fear that they may side against the president, but create a roadmap for him to follow for how to change birthright citizenship anyway. That's kind of one of my fears because they've done that in the past. Justice Kavanaugh did that with racial profiling when they allowed the racial profiling by ICE agents to continue. Justice Kavanaugh said these are all the ways you can make this essentially legal. So I fear there might be a win with like a roadmap going forward. What do you think the court's decisions mean for U.S. immigration going forward? Because on the one hand, you have the Trump administration wanting to enact even more restrictive policies going forward.

But on the other hand, you also have a Congress that doesn't want to do anything at all and a voting public that is largely in opposition to those policies. So what does this mean for the future? What it means is that this is now firmly on the table for Democrats to figure out, quite honestly, because for the last 10 years, they have, not had a very clear immigration strategy, but now the fact that 1.3 million more people will be undocumented is a governing issue for them. If they went back the House, there will be pressure there. There will be pressure today from advocates to take up bills to try and secure some form of legal status. They used to be very clear in fighting for the legalization of the undocumented community. That was a core democratic issue. And they kind of came away from that in the

Biden administration. And I talk about Democrats, because as long as Trump is in power. And as long as Stephen Miller is in his White House, we don't have two parties thinking about how to fix the immigration system. We have one party that's trying to remove as many immigrants as possible. And then we have one party that doesn't have a clear answer yet. So it really is now a big issue for Dems. It'll be an issue in the midterms in some states. I mean, the decision today will decimate the health care industry in Miami. Like, it will impact races across the country just because TPS holders are established and a lot of businesses employ them.

Andrea, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with Andrea Flores, founder of securing America's promise. Before we go, the Supreme Court is about to break for summer vacation, and as usual, they're working up until the very last minute on some of the biggest decisions of our lives. Earthright citizenship, trans athletes, absentee ballots, and more. Constitutional law professors, Kate, Melissa and Leah, break down the most consequential legal battles on strict scrutiny. New episodes drop every Monday, and keep an eye on your feed for

emergency episodes when the big opinions come out. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, celebrate the wonders of air conditioning, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how there's been a lot of debate online, as always, about AC, as Europe faces a massive heat wave, but it's clear that air conditioning saves lives and just makes life better. Like me, Wadaday is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston. And fun fact, an early form of air conditioning was first installed in the White House in 1881 to help President James Garfield recover from being shot.

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