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Reactionary June 25, 2026 SCOTUS Decisions [1]

['Blue Choir Singer', 'A Pagan In Arizona', 'Meteor Blades', 'Belinda Ridgewood']

Date: 2026-06-25  

Radical Reactionary Thursday, June 25, 2026–Trump Gets the Roberts SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)Decisions He Wants on Immigration, Asylum, Guns, and Limiting Lawsuit Liability June 25, 2026

The late liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan who sat on the Warren Court used to repeatedly tell his law clerks that with the Number 5, you can get “anything on the Supreme Court.” He, of course meant, that on SCOTUS, 5 is the “magic number” that gives the liberal/progressive side victories at the High Court composed of 9 Justices. Flash forward to the 2024 nightmare era of Demagogue/Dictator Donald. With the Trump-dominated court, the awful number is usually 6-3 or the party- line votes of conservative Justices Chief (CJ) John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. This 2:1 ratio”trumps” (pun intended) the dissenting trio of Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Justices appointed by Democratic presidents. Frankly, we should not at all be surprised. Remember when the right wing conservatives screamed at the Warren SCOTUS after it reversed convictions of Communists, reigned in the witch hunting HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), protected academic freedom, and said that the State Department had wrongly dismissed a diplomat over suspected disloyalty? That extremist right-wing set, which saw Communists under everyone’s bed, labeled June 17, 1957 “Black” or “Red” Monday. EBSCO+2, Hofstra University +2, EBSCO +1

June 25, 2026. I’m giving that date the name “Radical Reactionary Thursday.” On that date, the Roberts SCOTUS, dominated by 3 Trump appointees, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett, with the aid of CJ Roberts, Thomas, and Alito, gave Donald “ y uu ge” victories for his anti-immigrant, anti-gun control, and pro-big business interests. Let’s now look at those 4 horrible cases and what they mean.

Let’s start with the immigration cases. As we know, Trump ran and was able to convince many people to vote for him because of his “Let me deport as many immigrants as I can stand.”In a 6-3 decision, along the usual party-lines, SCOTUS cleared the way for Trump’s administration to end humanitarian protection protections that have permitted hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and Syria to live and work legally in the U.S. Demagogue/Dictator Donald had pushed to terminate this program, called the Temporary Protected Status, (T.P.S.) The T.P.S. program was created by Congress in 1990 with bipartisan support to provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries were deemed unsafe because of war, natural disasters, or other legal crises. This ideological opinion clears Donald’s path for potentially deporting 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians and it is, additionally, likely to have implications for T.P.S. holders from about a dozen other countries. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status.html

Justice Alito, writing for the majority, stated that the federal law at issue barred courts from second-guessing an administration’s determination to strip these protections from deportation. In Alito’s words, “This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad.”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status.html

How interesting! The normally “strict rigid conservative constructionist” Alito can suddenly interpret this statute broadly, something he does not normally do. His majority decision also rejected claims that the Trump administration’s decision was based on overt racial hostility toward Haitians.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status.html Really? As Justice Elena Kagan noted, along with her two fellow dissenters, Trump’s statements “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” Justice Kagan quoted extensively from Trump’s derogatory statements about Haitian immigrants. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status.html

In oral argument last April, the liberal Justices reminded everyone how Trump used racist appeals on the campaign trail when he said that Haitians were falsely “eating their neighbor’s pets.” They also noted that he had called Haitian immigrants undesirable because they came from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country.” “https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status.html

D.John Sauer, Trump’s Solicitor General, said that Trump’s statements were “unilluminating” and were references to poverty and crime, rather than race.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status.html Give us all a break from your twisting Trump’s literal words!

The second immigration case the Court decided on Radical Reactionary Thursday involved the related asylum issue. The statute at issue here said that any non-citizen who “arrives in the U.S. can apply for asylum.” In this conservative v. liberal 6-3 decision favoring the xenophobic Trump administration, SCOTUS had to decide what the word “arrive” meant. SCOTUS, in its usual 6-3 right-wing breakdown, agreed with the Trump administration that non-citizens must “fully cross the border” to gain the right to apply for asylum. Only then will they be given an interview regarding asylum. And in this opinion, the SCOTUS conservative majority said that migrants standing in Mexico do not “arrive” by “attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-asylum-border.html

For decades, the U.S. has interpreted the asylum law as providing migrants a right to seek protections at border crossings if they fear persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, or political views. Now, with fewer legal pathways to enter the U.S., there has been a backlogue of millions of cases and lengthy wait times for hearings. Despite this backlogue, lower courts have opposed Trump’s idea of making immigrants personally cross the U.S. border to plead for asylum. Lower courts have stated that asylum seekers must be processed if they have arrived at the border, even if they were stopped from stepping onto actual U.S. territory.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-asylum-border.html

The Trump administration argued that it was pushing to change the arrival policy to deal with “overcrowding.” If you believe that “overcrowding” nonsense from Donald and not that his policy was to push for radically restricting asylum rules to crack down on immigration, please get in line to purchase dirt cheap a bridge in Kings County, NY! Immigrant rights groups rightly argued that this Trump policy, previously carried out by him in his first term but rescinded by Biden in 2021, was inhumane. The three liberal Justices again dissented and Justice Sotomayor read a summary of her dissent from the bench. In Supreme Court practice, such reading from the bench is rare and shows the intensity of the dissenter’s opinion. Again, lower courts who heard the lawsuits from asylum seekers had it right–Trump’s new “arrival on U.S. soil only policy” was “at odds with our nation’s long political history of providing refuge to immigrants escaping persecution.”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-asylum-border.html

And, in Case #3 on Radical Reactionary Thursday, the Roberts Court, known for its favoring Big Business over consumers, did that again. In a 7-2 decision written by conservative Justice Kavanaugh, SCOTUS found in favor of the manufacturer of the weed killer Roundup. It overturned a $1.25 jury million award for gardener John Durnell of St. Louis, Missouri who claimed that his years of using Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkins lymphoma because he claimed that the company had failed to warn consumers of the dangers of the product which contained a chemical called glyphosate with carcinogenic properties. By overturning Durnell’s verdict, SCOTUS jeopardized thousands of lawsuits pending in state and federal courts against Bayer, the German company that had acquired Roundup’s original maker Monsanto. SCOTUS decided that the EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency) which labels pesticides nationally found no cancer risk in Roundup’s glyphosate and, therefore, pre-empted MO’s requirement of a cancer warning on Roundup’s label. Bayer, therefore, could not be sued in state courts. Trump’s administration backed Bayer’s side, reversing the stance taken by the Biden administration backing the plaintiff. https://www,nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-weedkiller-roundup-bayer.html

Of course, even if thousands of average Americans are getting sick and dying of chemically- induced cancer, it’s mega-corporate giants like Roundup and Bayer that need “protection.”

And in the last major Radical Reactionary Thursday decision, gun rights advocates won another big one. In the usual 6-3 party-line vote, Justice Alito struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission before carrying a firearm onto private property like grocery stores, coffee shops, and gas stations that are otherwise open to the public. In Justice Alito’s words, Hawaii’s law, “violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/supreme-court-hawaii-gun-law.html In 2022, this Court ruled that Americans have a broad right to arm themselves in public. And just recently, as I previously discussed, in a 9-0 decision, they voted in favor of a TX marijuana user who argued that gun owners should not be automatically stripped of their rights because of illegal drug use. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/supreme-court-hawaii-gun-law.html Hawaii has a long history of passing very strong gun regulations and is known for rarely granting concealed-carry permits, as early as 1833, way before its annexation by the U.S. and during the reign of King Kamehameha III. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/supreme-court-hawaii-gun-law.html

Never mind the supposed deference by a conservative SCOTUS to a state’s history and traditions. When gun rights are at issue, all such history and tradition, the Roberts Court supposedly emulates, goes out the window. Again, when people now enter public places, if gun owners come in, have a fight, and shoot up the place and kill people, this Court could care less. Again, always remember, elections for the presidency and the Senate influence Supreme Court appointments. Stay tuned for more reactionary Roberts Court end-of -the-year decisions.





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