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The Supreme Court dealt a painful blow to immigrants on Thursday in a pair of 6–3 decisions that expanded President Donald Trump’s drive to turn away or expel as many noncitizens as possible. First, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the conservative supermajority allowed the government to block refugees at the border, preventing them from entering the country and vindicating their right to seek asylum. Next, in Mullin v. Doe, the same justices allowed Trump to cancel Temporary Protected Status designations for those fleeing Haiti and Syria, subjecting hundreds of thousands of law-abiding migrants to detention and deportation. Justice Samuel Alito authored both opinions with a tone of sneering hostility toward the noncitizens whose lives will now be upended, coupled with obsequious deference to the Trump administration.

On a pop-up bonus episode of Amicus for Slate Plus members, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed these rulings and where they fit into the Supreme Court’s broader complicity in the president’s mass deportation campaign. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: These were incredibly consequential gut punches, two more in a long sequence of brutalizing cases. We saw the rights of asylum-seekers and TPS beneficiaries just absolutely flattened in one day.

Mark Joseph Stern: I’ll start with the TPS case, Mullin v. Doe, because it illustrates the weird synergy between the conservative supermajority and the Trump administration on the question of whether this president can do whatever he wants. Mullin was a challenge to the Trump administration’s premature termination of TPS for immigrants from Haiti and Syria. Now, Congress did allow the executive branch to terminate a TPS designation. But it laid out a specific........

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