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From the moment President Donald Trump began his second term, he was determined to upend America’s immigration system. Over the past year, instead of being a check on the executive branch, the U.S. Supreme Court has happily helped the president get his way. First came the high court’s decision to allow Trump to invoke the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act, then the justices agreed to take on the question of birthright citizenship. This week, the high court delivered two back-to-back opinions that will immediately allow the Trump administration to deport hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian nationals, while also allowing immigration officers to reject any asylum-seeking migrant who approaches the U.S.–Mexico border. These decisions will have immediate and devastating consequences that won’t only help the Trump administration’s punitive immigration agenda today, but stand to fundamentally change U.S. immigration law for years to come.

In Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority ruled that former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to revoke temporary protected status, a humanitarian relief program that grants temporary legal status to foreign nationals, from Haitian and Syrian nationals was not reviewable. The court also ruled that the president’s numerous racist comments toward Haitians and other African countries weren’t necessarily motivated by race, and therefore could not have unlawfully influenced Noem’s decision to revoke TPS from Haiti in contravention of the 14th Amendment’s protections against racial animus. Despite lower courts coming to the exact opposite conclusion, the Supreme Court effectively green-lit the immediate deportations of over 300,000 Haitian nationals currently in the U.S. and about 3,900 Syrian nationals.

Then came the opinion in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, which concluded that migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. at the U.S.–Mexico border must physically set foot on American soil before U.S. officials are forced to initiate asylum screening procedures. It creates a legal pathway for the Trump administration to continue the controversial metering policy, where border officials can force migrants to wait in Mexico along the U.S. border until they are called to file an asylum application.

Both opinions garnered scathing dissents by the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, and for good reason. Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, told me that she believes thousands of bona fide asylum-seekers will be turned away from the U.S. border “in a way that violates the promise that this country made in the wake of the horrors of World War II and the........

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