One Day, Three Decisions: "No Asylum, No Children, No Mercy: America Declares Itself Closed"

On June 25, 2026, the United States demonstrated through three separate actions what it does to people who trust its promises of protection. In a 6 to 3 decision, the Supreme Court cleared the way to remove 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians from Temporary Protected Status, leaving them vulnerable to deportation.

In a second 6 to 3 ruling, the same Court allowed the Trump administration to physically turn asylum seekers away at the southern border before they reach American soil, where federal law would otherwise grant them the right to apply for protection. At the same time, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon revealed in a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the administration maintains a list of more than 500 unaccompanied minors in federal custody whom it intends to deport through an accelerated process before June 30 - without lawyers, without notifying their families, and without court proceedings. A tremendous amount of work now lies ahead for all of us, but we accept that fight.

Three Developments, One Day, One Direction

Temporary Protected Status was created by Congress in 1990 with bipartisan support for people whose home countries had become uninhabitable because of war, natural disasters, or other crises. Haiti received that protection after the 2010 earthquake, which is estimated to have killed around 220,000 people. Syria was added after civil war erupted in 2011. Since then, the status has been repeatedly extended because conditions in both countries have not improved. The people covered by the program lived in the United States legally. They worked legally, paid taxes, and sent their children to American schools. Engineers, physicians, nurses, and students. These are not abstract categories. They are the very people identified by name in the lawsuits before the Supreme Court.

Editorial Note
Over the coming days, there may be minor delays in our regular publishing schedule. The reason is simple: We are committing almost our entire team to these developing cases because time matters and because there is no alternative. We will do everything we can to continue covering all other topics as you have come to expect.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the conservative majority, said that the law explicitly bars courts from reviewing executive branch decisions on this issue. "The text is clear, and its plain meaning is sweeping," he wrote. The conservative majority also concluded that the decision to strip Haitians of Temporary Protected Status was not motivated by anti-Haitian or anti-Black bias. None of the statements cited from government officials, the Court said, were "overtly racist." They could "all be explained by race neutral justifications."

Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, quoted extensively from Donald Trump's own public statements about Haitian immigrants. During the 2024 campaign, Trump claimed that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors' pets. He described Haitian immigrants as unwelcome because they came from a "dirty, filthy, disgusting" country. "These statements fairly scream, in both their racist undertones and overtones, that race played a role in the President's determination to remove Haitians from this country," Kagan wrote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench, an unusual step that justices generally reserve for decisions they believe carry historic significance. The majority, she said, had allowed the government to "slam the door on all those fleeing persecution."

Read also our article: How Six Supreme Court Justices Brought Back the Spirit of the Third Reich

Stephen Miller, the White House's top domestic policy adviser, responded to the rulings by declaring that the United States was now "completely closed to asylum seekers." Haitians protected under TPS, he said, should leave the country. The Department of Homeland Security celebrated the decision. "The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty. This is a victory for the rule of law and common sense."

At the same time, Senator Ron Wyden wrote to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on June 24, saying he had received credible information that the Department of Health and Human Services was using a list of more than 500 unaccompanied children in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement to rapidly deport them under a legal framework that has no clear statutory basis. The children come from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Afghanistan. They have been in federal custody for at least 180 days, most of them living with foster families, and have been classified as "Category 4," meaning no guardian has been identified. The absence of an identified guardian can mean that the parents remain in the home country, are deceased, or are afraid to come forward because ICE has previously arrested undocumented parents during family reunification efforts.

Wyden's letter lists six demands, including disclosure of the scope of the operation, the legal authority the department claims to be relying on, the protocols for notifying attorneys and families, coordination with foreign consulates, and whether children were asked to sign voluntary departure documents without legal counsel. He demanded written confirmation by the close of business on June 26, 2026, and an immediate halt to any deportation plans. The department dismissed his warnings as "irresponsible fearmongering." It insisted that no such plans existed.

Wyden issued the same warning in August 2025. During that Labor Day weekend, nearly 700 Guatemalan children were taken from foster shelters and foster families in the middle of the night, loaded onto buses, and driven to airport tarmacs in Texas. Their attorneys were not notified. A federal judge was awakened in the middle of the night and halted the flights. Children who had fled violence in their home countries cried, prayed, and vomited on the tarmac. One child required hospitalization for several days afterward. Months later, another child refused to board buses, even for medical appointments or court hearings. Anyone who assumes that an agency willing to do that once would never do it again either does not know the history or has chosen to look away.

Read also our articles: Another Small Victory – Court Stops Deportation of Guatemalan Children

Race Against Time – “Everyone Fighting to Save Honduran Children from Trump’s Deportations”

The Children of Arizona - A court stops Trump's deportation plans to Honduras and Guatemala

The closure of "Alligator Alcatraz," the improvised deportation center in the Florida Everglades that Ron DeSantis had erected within days in July 2025, offers only limited reassurance in that context. DeSantis said the facility had served its purpose, with 21,000 people deported through it. It was closed because hurricane season had begun and the site was structurally unsafe. It was not closed because tents without functioning toilets, food containing worms, air conditioning that was abruptly shut off, and insects everywhere were deemed inhumane. Detainees described rows of bunk beds inside massive white tents surrounded by chain link cages. They went days without being allowed to shower or receive their prescribed medications. Environmental organizations have filed lawsuits because the facility was built without the required permits. Those legal questions remain unresolved, even though the site itself has been shut down.

Read also our article: The Next Defeat: Alligator Alcatraz Shuts Down for Good - Noem’s Prestige Project Chokes on Its Own Price Tag

What connects these three developments is not simply that they happened at the same time. It is the logic behind them. The Supreme Court has stripped lower courts of the authority to review executive decisions on protected status. The administration is preparing to deport children before courts have completed their cases. Wyden explicitly describes it as an effort to bypass judicial oversight and cut off access to legal remedies. The Everglades detention center was built without permits and shut down without accountability. The government is systematically placing itself beyond judicial, legislative, and regulatory oversight.

Carl Schmitt, the German constitutional scholar and committed Nazi who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, justified the legal disempowerment of the Reichstag, wrote antisemitic legal doctrines, and whose work is still treated by autocrats across the political spectrum as a toolbox, argued that the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. What has been unfolding in the United States for months is not a legal state of exception. It is the administrative normalization of one. Immigration law is being rewritten through executive orders. Protection programs are being dismantled through internal screening procedures. Children are taken from foster families in the middle of the night. Congress writes letters that go unanswered. Courts are bypassed before they can issue rulings.

Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench. Justices do that when they believe what is happening will become part of history, and when they want it on the record before it is too late.

It is not too late. Not yet.

What that means in practice can be measured in the numbers behind these decisions. Temporary Protected Status currently covers approximately 1.3 million people from 17 countries. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has sought to terminate the program for 13 of those 17 countries. TPS was not the only refugee protection program that was reshaped. The administration fundamentally restructured the refugee admissions system and sharply reduced the number of people allowed to enter, with one notable exception. White South Africans remain eligible to use the program. For people from Haiti, Syria, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, or Afghanistan, the available pathways are disappearing one by one.

The Supreme Court's second decision on Thursday, allowing asylum seekers to be turned back at the border, has its own history. The so called turn back policy, the physical prevention of asylum seekers from reaching U.S. territory, was first implemented in 2016. Under federal law, anyone who reaches American soil has the right to apply for asylum. The turn back policy strips people of that right by physically preventing them from exercising it. The policy was suspended under President Biden. It has now returned with the approval of the Supreme Court.

Stephen Miller defended the deportation of more than 350,000 Haitians whose protected status had been revoked following the Supreme Court's ruling. In his view, people do not have a legal right to asylum simply because they face high levels of crime in their home country. Haiti, he argued, is the homeland of Haitians, and they can return there. The Trump administration considers the expanded Temporary Protected Status granted under President Biden to have expired and argues that the emergencies justifying those protections have ended. Miller maintained that critics had failed to present any legally sustainable arguments against the deportations.

The liberal justices dissented together in both cases. That is notable because it illustrates how completely the Court is divided along the line created by Trump's appointments. Three justices against six. Every time. The institutional mechanism that is supposed to restrain the executive no longer functions as an independent check. It reflects the political composition created by the appointment process.

Wyden's letter to Kennedy is not merely a warning document in that context. It is also evidence of congressional failure. Wyden writes that he has sent the department four letters in recent months. None received a substantive response. He is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which exercises oversight over the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The department ignores him. Not because it is legally entitled to do so, but because it has learned that there are no consequences.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement is legally required to place unaccompanied children in "the least restrictive setting," which in practice generally means with relatives or foster families while their immigration proceedings continue. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 and the Flores Settlement Agreement establish that framework. Wyden writes that the department is developing a so called "voluntary repatriation" process that has no statutory basis. Neither the Flores Agreement nor the 2008 law authorizes deporting children simply because no guardian has been identified. The department is building a mechanism that is not authorized by law and plans to use it before June 30, the date immigration courts have been instructed to complete these children's cases. The timing is not accidental. It is calculated.

Ahilan Arulanantham, the attorney representing the Syrian plaintiffs in the TPS case, said after the ruling that the decision allowed the government to "disregard a fundamental humanitarian protection that Congress enacted on a bipartisan basis three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees would not be subjected to the whims of partisan politics." Millions of people, he said, are now "at risk of being returned to countries in crisis."

The danger is tangible. The children taken to the airport tarmacs over Labor Day weekend in 2025 fled precisely those conditions. They were being sent back to what they had escaped, and only a federal judge awakened in the middle of the night prevented it at the last moment. This time, Wyden issued his warning earlier. Whether anyone acts in time remains an open question.

What is not open is the direction.