The Supreme Court’s 6-3 Ruling: TPS, Concealed Carry, and Firing Power

During its 2025–2026 term, the Supreme Court issued a series of 6-3 rulings in which the six conservative justices sided with the Trump administration and conservative legal positions across immigration, voting rights, gun regulation, and executive power, while Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in each. The most consequential decisions came in a single week at the end of June 2026: the Court ended Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, held that asylum seekers standing in Mexico have no right to apply, expanded border officers’ power over green card holders, struck down a Hawaii concealed-carry restriction, and overturned a 91-year-old precedent that had protected the heads of independent agencies from being fired at will.

Ending TPS for Haitians and Syrians

The term’s most far-reaching immigration ruling was Mullin v. Doe, decided June 25, 2026. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, held that the Temporary Protected Status statute bars federal courts from reviewing the administration’s decisions to terminate or extend TPS designations, except on constitutional grounds.¹ The decision cleared the way for the administration to end protections for roughly 330,000 to 350,000 Haitian nationals and several thousand Syrians who had been living and working legally in the United States.²

The Court read the statute’s bar on judicial review of “any determination” broadly. It covers not only the ultimate decision but the administrative steps leading to it, including the required consultations with other federal agencies about country conditions. The majority rejected a distinction between substantive and procedural challenges, finding no such line in the statute.¹

Justice Kagan’s dissent argued that the statute still permits courts to review whether the Secretary followed the procedural steps Congress mandated, and contended that the Secretary had failed to conduct the required consultations.³ Kagan also pressed the Haitian plaintiffs’ equal protection claim, quoting a presidential statement asking why the country accepts people from places like “Haiti [and] Somalia” rather than “Norway [and] Sweden,” and writing that the evidence “fairly shout[s], in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” The majority declined to reproduce those statements, writing that none were “overtly racial” and that all “expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”⁴

Who Is Affected

Both Haiti and Syria remain on the State Department’s “do not travel” list. Haiti has been under a state of emergency since March 2024.² About 200,000 Haitian TPS holders are in the U.S. workforce, including roughly 15,000 agricultural workers and 13,000 nursing assistants, and they contribute an estimated $5.9 billion to the economy annually. An estimated 50,000 U.S. citizen children have at least one parent with Haitian TPS.⁵ Nearly three-quarters of Haitian TPS workers live in Florida and New York, concentrated in Miami, New York City, and Boston.⁶

The ruling reversed injunctions from federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C. Once TPS ends, holders lose work authorization and protection from deportation, reverting to whatever status they held before receiving TPS. For many, that is no lawful status at all. One refugee-rights group reported that the termination was scheduled to take effect 32 days after the ruling, absent further district court action.⁷

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Secretary of Homeland Security has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal — 13 in total as of June 2026.¹ Remaining designations for El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine face potential termination during fall 2026 renewal cycles. After Mullin, Administrative Procedure Act challenges are no longer available, and equal protection claims face an exceptionally high evidentiary bar.⁴

Asylum Seekers Blocked at the Border

On the same day, the Court decided Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, another 6-3 opinion by Justice Alito. The Court held that a person standing in Mexico who is prevented from crossing has not “arrived in the United States” under federal immigration law and is therefore not entitled to apply for asylum or to be inspected by an immigration officer.⁸ The ruling validated “metering,” under which border officials physically prevent asylum seekers from stepping onto U.S. soil in order to limit processing at ports of entry.

The majority relied on the ordinary meaning of “arrive” and on Congress’s 1996 decision to replace “at a land border” with “arrives in the United States,” reading that change as a requirement of physical presence. The Court also invoked the presumption against extraterritoriality.⁹ Justice Sotomayor’s dissent warned that the ruling allows the executive branch to “circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having U.S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting a foot onto U.S. soil,” creating a “perverse incentive” for illegal crossings.¹⁰

Green Card Holders Returning From Abroad

Two days earlier, on June 23, the Court ruled 6-3 in Blanche v. Lau that border officers are not required to possess “clear and convincing evidence” that a lawful permanent resident has committed a disqualifying crime before preventing them from reentering. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas held that the evidentiary standard applies at a later removal hearing, not at the moment a border officer makes a “quick judgment on the spot.”¹¹

The practical effect: a green card holder returning from abroad can be reclassified from “already admitted” to “seeking admission” based on a pending charge, and can be detained or paroled on that basis. Justice Jackson’s dissent warned that this “demotion” leaves permanent residents vulnerable to immediate detention and jeopardizes their residency and employment.¹¹

A New Standard Under the Voting Rights Act

In Louisiana v. Callais, decided April 29, 2026, the Court overhauled the enforcement framework for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The 6-3 majority held that Section 2 now imposes liability only when there is a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” shifting the standard from discriminatory effects to discriminatory intent.¹²

The Court updated the framework from Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) to account for the correlation between race and party affiliation in modern elections. Plaintiffs challenging a redistricting map must now provide illustrative maps that do not use race as a criterion, and must disentangle racial voting patterns from partisanship through statistical analysis. Courts are instructed to give “much less weight” to historical evidence of discrimination and to prioritize present-day intentional discrimination.¹² States can defend against vote-dilution claims by arguing that their maps were drawn on party lines rather than race.¹³ In dissent, Justice Kagan wrote that the ruling “converts Section 2 into its opposite” and called it the majority’s “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”¹⁴

Hawaii’s Concealed-Carry Law Struck Down

On June 25, the Court also ruled 6-3 in Wolford v. Lopez that a Hawaii law prohibiting concealed-carry permit holders from carrying handguns on private property open to the public — unless the property owner gave express permission — violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. Justice Alito wrote that the law imposed an “undue burden” on the right to carry firearms for self-defense by flipping the common-law default: instead of permitting entry unless the owner forbade it, the statute required affirmative consent.¹⁵

The ruling extends the Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, which requires gun regulations to have a historical analogue from the founding era. California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey have enacted similar laws that are now likely unenforceable.¹⁶

Presidential Firing Power and the End of Humphrey’s Executor

Four days later, on June 29, the Court issued its most structurally significant ruling of the term. In Trump v. Slaughter, the 6-3 majority held that the president may fire Federal Trade Commission commissioners at will, overturning the 1935 precedent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which had shielded independent-agency heads from removal without cause.¹⁷ Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that because the FTC exercises executive power, its commissioners are the president’s subordinates and must be removable by him.

The case arose after President Trump fired FTC Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in March 2025. Slaughter sued and initially won reinstatement before the Supreme Court reversed. The ruling potentially converts dozens of independent commissions into bodies subject to at-will presidential control, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board.¹⁸

Roberts carved out the Federal Reserve, writing that the Court was leaving questions about its independence for “another day.” In a separate 5-4 ruling issued the same day, Trump v. Cook, the Court blocked the president from immediately removing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa D. Cook, holding that she had not been given a fair chance to refute the allegations cited as grounds for dismissal.¹⁸

Justice Sotomayor’s 49-page dissent in Slaughter warned that the ruling “distorts the structure of Government” and grants the president “power unknown even to the English Crown.”¹⁷

An Earlier Signal on Immigration Enforcement

The term’s ideological alignment was visible months before June. In September 2025, the Court ruled 6-3 in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo to stay a federal injunction that had barred immigration agents conducting “Operation At Large” in the Los Angeles area from using a person’s apparent ethnicity, language, location, or type of work as the sole basis for an investigative stop.¹⁹ Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring, suggested that the high number of undocumented immigrants in the area and their concentration at specific work sites could satisfy the “reasonable suspicion” standard. Sotomayor dissented: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”²⁰ The order was an emergency stay rather than a final merits decision, but it allowed the sweeps to continue.

The Shape of the Term

The 2025–2026 term produced at least ten decisions split along strict ideological lines, four more than the prior term.²¹ In each of the major 6-3 rulings, the same six justices — Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — formed the majority, with Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissenting. Additional cases with potential for similar splits, including the birthright citizenship challenge in Trump v. Barbara, remained pending as the term closed.²²

1
Supreme Court of the United States. Mullin v. Doe, No. 25-1083
2
NBC News. Supreme Court Allows Trump to Remove Protections for Thousands of Haitian, Syrian Nationals
3
Just Security. Supreme Court Mullin v. Doe TPS
4
Cornell Law Institute. Mullin v. Doe, No. 25-1083
5
FWD.us. New Data Reveals the Immense Human and Economic Cost of Terminating Haiti Temporary Protected Status
6
Migration Policy Institute. Haitian Immigrants in the United States
7
International Refugee Assistance Project. SCOTUS Gives Trump Administration Carte Blanche to Strip More Than a Million People of Their Legal Status
8
Supreme Court of the United States. Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, No. 25-5
9
Cornell Law Institute. Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, No. 25-5
10
National Constitution Center. Justices End Protected Status for Syrian, Haitian Immigrants; Define Asylum Border Status
11
SCOTUSblog. Court Sides With Government in Dispute Over Rights of Green Card Holders
12
Supreme Court of the United States. Louisiana v. Callais, Nos. 24-109/24-110
13
Campaign Legal Center. US Supreme Court Has Eviscerated the Voting Rights Act
14
Equal Justice Initiative. Supreme Court Undermines Black Political Participation in Devastating Ruling on Voting Rights Act
15
Supreme Court of the United States. Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046
16
NPR. Supreme Court Rules on Hawaii Gun Law
17
SCOTUSblog. Court Allows Trump to Fire FTC Commissioner and Overturns Major Restraint on Presidential Power
18
New York Times. Trump Supreme Court Presidential Power
19
SCOTUSblog. Roving Patrols, Reasonable Suspicion, and Perdomo
20
American Immigration Council. Supreme Court’s Decision on Racial Profiling in Immigration Raids
21
CNN. 6-3 Supreme Court
22
NPR. Supreme Court Major Cases Left 2026