NOW PLAYING
The Supreme Court left President Trump and gun rights advocates celebrating on Thursday.
In a series of 6-3 decisions, the high court ticked off some of its anticipated remaining cases as the justices move closer to their summer recess.
But their rulings didn’t come without friction on the bench.
Here are five takeaways.
Trump’s appointees help deliver him significant wins on immigration
Leading the day were a pair of big immigration decisions that both favored Trump.
Each came down along the court’s familiar ideological lines, with the president’s own appointees providing some of the crucial votes.
The first allows Trump to proceed with a key plank of his second-term deportation crackdown by cutting off legal protections for Haitians and Syrians.
Most immediately, it means that roughly 330,000 Haitians and nearly 4,000 Syrians enrolled in Temporary Protected Status (TPS) could be deported if they don’t have other lawful status. But it’s set to have a ripple impact beyond just those two countries. The Trump administration has sought to terminate TPS for 13 and counting of the 17 countries designated for the program.
All six conservative justices agreed that judges had no authority to hear most of the challengers’ claims in the first place, ruling that the law establishing TPS bars judicial review.
It left the White House calling the decision a “tremendous win.”
Trump’s Supreme Court appointees on Thursday also gave him the green light on another immigration policy.
In this case, Trump has yet to try the point of leverage in his second term yet. But he’s long wanted the legal right to do so.
The case concerns “metering,” which began in the Obama administration. It allows border officials to turn back migrants before they physically cross the border, preventing them from making an asylum claim. The court agreed 6-3 that the policy complies with federal law.
Trump’s streak on immigration at the Supreme Court may not last. The justices still have yet to rule on whether his birthright citizenship order can stand. Many court watchers and the president himself have predicted that he will lose that case.
Alito has big day with 3 opinions
It was a busy morning for Justice Samuel Alito.
The third most senior conservative justice authored three of the four majority opinions released by the court on Thursday, the two immigration decisions and another that expanded the rights of gun owners to carry concealed weapons on private property.
Similar instances are rare in the modern era, when the court takes up roughly half the number of cases it did prior to the late 1980s.
Alito delivering three opinions on the same day makes it much less likely that he will write any majority opinions in the remaining cases on the dockets given that the justices tend to split up their work evenly.
With six other justices also winding down on authorship, that leaves Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh as the likely contenders to deliver the bulk of the remaining opinions.
Kavanaugh has written four opinions so far this term, including one on Thursday that limited Americans’ ability to sue pesticide makers when allegedly harmed by their products.
Roberts has authored three, with several high-profile cases still on the docket.
Justices clash on the bench
In public, the Supreme Court justices insist they get along. But in the courtroom on Thursday, a testy moment emerged.
Justice Samuel Alito issued a rare off-the-cuff response after Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent in the court’s asylum case from the bench.
Sotomayor’s aloud reading was already a statement in itself. The justices only read dissents in a few cases to emphasize their strong disagreements. She warned that “more people will die,” calling the decision “illogical” as the courtroom audience listened in.
Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, leaned back in his chair and rocked back and forth during her remarks, at one point leaning forward to prop his chin on his hands to gaze up at the ceiling.
But what happened next is what caught many in the room by surprise.
After Sotomayor concluded her dissent, Alito responded tersely that he would have included more in his original remarks if he had known that the liberal justice would read the minority opinion in full. He noted that the immigration powers in question had been used under two administrations and described the asylum policy as “orderly and humane.”
The clapback is exceedingly rare. Normally, the court would immediately move onto the next decision after Sotomayor finished reading.
This “metering” policy began under former President Obama’s administration and was formalized during President Trump’s first term. The policy ended during former President Biden’s administration.
Gun rights advocates sweep Second Amendment cases
Thursday also left gun rights advocates with a 2-0 sweep in Second Amendment cases at the Supreme Court this term.
In another decision along ideological lines, the court ruled that Hawaii cannot bar permit holders from carrying their firearm on private property when they don’t have express permission from the property owner.
“Today, the Supreme Court drove the final stake through one of the most cynical anti-rights schemes devised after Bruen,” Firearms Policy Coalition President Brandon Combs said in a statement.
It’s a reference to the conservative majority’s landmark 2022 decision expanding gun rights. It requires gun control measures to have a historical analogue to survive.
Hawaii’s measure is just the latest gun control law to fall under that new test.
“These laws were always a blatant attempt by authoritarian states to nullify Bruen and redline the right to bear arms out of existence,” Combs said. “We are glad to see this issue put in the ground where it belongs.”
The decision left groups that advocate for stronger gun control disappointed. They had held out hope that the conservative majority would still side with them despite those past rulings.
“I will not mince words: This deeply dangerous majority opinion privileges guns over everything and all people in society,” Brady President Kris Brown said in a statement.
MAHA takes a hit
The Supreme Court delivered a blow to the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement when it sided with a pesticide company and blocked lawsuits that sought to hold them accountable for failing to warn their customers about the potential risks of using their products.
The 7-2 ruling found that state-level failure-to-warn lawsuits were preempted by federal law, effectively shielding companies from liability lawsuits even if juries find that their products cause cancer or health problems.
The case was a win for Monsanto, a Bayer-owned company that was sued by a cancer patient over its alleged failure to provide adequate warning of the carcinogen risk associated with its Roundup weedkiller.
But it sent shockwaves through MAHA, a group led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that has been widely skeptical of agricultural, chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
The core movement strongly opposes glyphosate, a key ingredient in many weedkillers that some studies have linked to cancer, while others have not.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not recognized a cancer link in the herbicide and determined cancer warnings labels are not necessary for the products it’s used in.
The Trump administration agreed and backed Monsanto in court, a move that angered many of its allies.
MAHA-aligned activist Kelly Ryerson offered a harsh critique of the high court’s decision on Thursday, likening it to a “domestic chemical attack.”
“Never in history has an administration so blatantly and willingly sold out our fertility, vitality, and health to corporate interest,” she wrote on the social platform X. “It is unforgivable.”
Some Americans had found success in their efforts to sue pesticide companies in lower courts, racking up millions of dollars in verdicts.
Rachel Frazin contributed.
Add as preferred source on Google Tags Brett Kavanaugh Joe Biden John Roberts Obama Samuel Alito Sonia SotomayorCopyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Link copiedMore Court Battles News
See All
Court Battles Judge orders DOJ to produce, unredact sought after Epstein files by Rebecca Beitsch 10 minutes ago Court Battles / 10 minutes ago 
