Six Justices Put Out the Statue of Liberty's Torch This Morning

The Supreme Court decided who counts as human at our border today, and 350,000 families are about to pay the price. Here is what happened, and what you do next.

I have stood in front of juries for almost forty years. I’ve even spent time on the bench as a judge pro tem. So when I tell you something happened this morning inside the highest court in the country that should shake you awake, I am asking you to trust the read of someone who has spent his life inside this system.

Today, on June 25, 2026, six members of the United States Supreme Court quietly changed what your country promises the world. They wrapped the whole thing in dry legal language built to make your eyes glaze over and your attention drift. Underneath the vocabulary sits a decision about who gets treated as a human being at our border and who gets shoved back into the dark.

You deserve the plain version. Once you see what these six justices signed their names to, you will understand why sitting out the next election is a luxury none of us own anymore.

The Words In Bronze

A poem has welcomed the world from the base of the Statue of Liberty for generations. Most of us grew up hearing a few of the lines without ever reading the whole thing.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Those words were a promise. For a long stretch of our history they were also the law. A frightened mother running from a death squad, a father fleeing a gang that already murdered his brother, a family escaping a government that tortures its own people. Show up at our door, say you are afraid, and you earned the right to make your case. The system crawled. The system buckled under its own backlog. The system existed.

This morning, the Court turned the promise into a permission slip the government hands out on a whim.

Ruling One: Knock All You Want, You Haven’t Arrived

The first decision came down six to three, split along the same ideological line you have come to expect. The justices handed the Trump administration the green light to revive a practice called metering, where federal agents physically block asylum seekers at the southern border before a single toe touches American soil.

Our law says a person who arrives in the United States has the right to ask for asylum. The whole case turned on one word. Arrives. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, decided a terrified family standing at the line in Mexico has not arrived at all. His comparison, and I promise I am not inventing this: a guest does not arrive at a house simply by knocking on the front door.

Alito is the same Supreme Court Justice who in January 2021, flew an upside-down American flag outside his Virginia home. Below is an actual picture of his house and flag. In case your forgot, the inverted flag is a recognized symbol of political distress heavily associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement following the 2020 presidential election.

But I regress, back to today’s SCOTUS decisions.

Sit with the cruelty for a second. A human being flees for their life, reaches the border of the strongest nation on earth, presents themselves to an officer, and asks for protection. Six justices looked at that person and said you are not here yet, so we owe you nothing. Turn around. Go back to whatever you were running from.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent out loud from the bench, a move justices save for the decisions they find most indefensible. She warned that the majority had, in her words, extinguished the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty. She is right.

Ruling Two: Three Hundred Fifty Thousand Lives, Tossed

The second decision was colder. Same six to three split (of course). This time the Court cleared the runway for the administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,100 Syrians who have been living here legally, working here, paying taxes here, raising American children here, some of them for well over a decade.

Congress created this protection in 1990 with support from both parties. The point was simple and decent. People from countries shattered by war, earthquakes, and collapse should not get deported straight back into the disaster. Haiti earned the designation in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake leveled the country. Syria earned the same protection in 2012 as the Assad regime slaughtered its own civilians.

Here is the part you need to hold onto. Our own State Department right now warns American citizens in the strongest possible terms to stay away from both countries. Kidnapping. Terrorism. Gang warfare. Armed conflict. Too dangerous for an American tourist to visit. Safe enough, according to this administration, to deport a Haitian nurse and her kids.

Justice Alito wrote this majority too. He held the law blocks the courts from second guessing the Homeland Security Secretary’s call. The justices did look at the claim that racism drove the decision, and six of them decided it would likely lose. The result lands in the same brutal place. The protection a federal judge had granted these families gets ripped away, and the road to deportation swings open.

The Part They Refused To Print

Lower court judges had found something disturbing in the record. They found credible evidence that racial hostility drove the decision to expel Haitians. The evidence came straight from the President’s own mouth.

This is the man who stood on a debate stage and smeared Black immigrants with lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats. A lie. A grotesque, racist lie. This is the man who called Haiti a filthy and disgusting country.

Justice Alito waved all of it away. He wrote none of those statements was overtly racial, and that each one supposedly rested on race neutral policy views. Read those words again and let your stomach turn.

Justice Elena Kagan refused to play along. She pointed out the President’s remarks were so vile and so soaked in racism that the majority would not even reprint them in the opinion. So she reprinted them herself. Then she wrote the statements shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson signed their names beside hers.

Who Is Actually Running Things

I am a lawyer. I weigh evidence for a living. So let me give you my honest read of the evidence in front of us.

A President smears Black immigrants with lies about eating their neighbors’ pets and calls their homeland filthy. His administration moves to deport them by the hundreds of thousands. Lower court judges look at the paper trail and conclude racial animus likely poisoned the whole decision. Six Republican appointed justices decide none of that rises to the level of racism worth caring about.

When the cruelty lands hardest on Black and brown families fleeing for their lives, and the people in charge keep inventing clever legal reasons to look away, you are allowed to name what you are seeing. White nationalism wearing a robe and quoting a statute is still white nationalism.

This is the country Donald Trump and the people around him are building, brick by brick, ruling by ruling. A country where the words in our Constitution and on our most famous statue mean nothing the moment they become inconvenient. In these two cases, a country that carves beautiful promises into bronze and then turns away the exact people those promises were written for.

Why Your Kids and Grandkids Are Counting On You

You might be tempted to file this under someone else’s problem. Resist that urge. A government strong enough to decide a desperate family standing at the door does not legally exist is a government strong enough to come for your rights next. The same legal trick that erases an asylum seeker today gets pointed somewhere new tomorrow.

Your children and grandchildren will inherit whatever we tolerate right now. They will ask, one day, what you did in the year your country decided the golden door swings shut for the wretched and the tired and the poor. Give them an answer you are proud of.

What You Do Next

The Supreme Court has spoken, and we have no appeal from the Supreme Court. We have something better. We have a Congress, and a Congress answers to you.

Six justices got their seats because of the people Americans elected to the White House and the Senate. Elections built this Court. Elections built this moment. Elections are how we start to repair it.

The 2026 midterms are coming. Win back the majority in Congress, and we gain the muscle to check this administration, protect these families, and defend the promise stamped on that statue in New York Harbor. Stay home, and the people doing this keep doing it with no one standing in their way.

Register. Confirm you are still on the voter rolls in your state, because purges happen and they happen quietly. Talk to your neighbors. Talk to the ones who think their single vote does not matter, and remind them that six votes on a Thursday morning rewrote the soul of this country.

Share this. Forward this. Post this. Then show up.

The lamp beside the golden door is flickering. Whether the lamp goes out is on us.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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They are counting on you to look away, to assume someone else will object, to let six votes on a Thursday morning quietly rewrite who we are. Refuse to stay silent, subscribe to Uncensored Objection, and keep your voice in the fight before the lamp beside that golden door goes dark for good.

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