☕️ UNSHACKLED ☙ Friday, June 26, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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SCOTUS begins unloading big decisions; “major wins” for Republicans; shackles stripped off; Haitians now face largest mass deportation in history; Trump’s reverse-lawfare strategy pays off; more.

JEFF CHILDERS

JUN 26READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Yesterday the Supreme Court began publishing its more controversial decisions, including a pair of immigration cases that badly triggered the left. We’ll look at why it triggered progressives, why CNN calls the decisions “major wins” for conservatives, and why they made the New York Times fret about ‘taking the President’s shackles off’— a very odd metaphor for them to use. Then we’ll connect all that to Trump’s anti-lawfare strategy and even to the SAVE Act’s prospects.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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As we rocket into the tail end of June —the Nation’s 250th Anniversary is now only eight days away— the Supreme Court is following its usual custom of clearing its back catalog of controversial decisions. Next week is the final week when the headline cases drop. But we’re starting to reach the good stuff. Yesterday, CNN reported, “Supreme Court gives Trump major wins on two immigration cases.” That was a pretty tame example.

Democrats of all stripes are losing their minds, and corporate media is unloading bizarrely hysterical headlines. But it was terrific news for Springfield’s cats and dogs.

The Justices have a habit of saving their spiciest cases for last, practically tossing them to clerks over their shoulders as they race to their cars to get out of dodge before the fireworks start. Waiting till the last second has the happy effects of: reducing the hordes of angry activists screaming into air horns, shrinking crowds infesting the Court’s front porch, and eliminating the ever-present miasma of rancid B.O. floating up from sweaty protesters into SCOTUS windows.

You can’t blame them. If SCOTUS released its sauciest cases early in the term, it would have to endure constant protests. And, ‘Ain’t nobody has time for dat.’ After all, that’s their workplace.

What I immediately noticed in yesterday’s dump of highly controversial immigration cases was that it suggests the final batch of eight orders we have yet to see will be off the chain. Before we discuss what happened yesterday, note what the Court is still holding back: birthright citizenship, transgender sports bans, agency removal power, Fed appointments, and mail‑in ballot deadlines.

Those last eight will explode into view next week, days or hours before the Court takes its summer holiday, and right before the Independence Day weekend.

Happy Fourth of July, America!

⚖️ SCOTUS dropped only four opinions yesterday. The first decision held that Hawaii may not enforce special gun restrictions just because ancestral spirits told it to (i.e., “Hawaiian native traditions”). You think I’m joking? Justice Alito wrote, “the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of the United States. It cannot give way to ‘the spirit of Aloha’ in Hawaii any more than it can yield to the spirit of the Big Apple or the Windy City.”

Hawaiians. SMDH.

The next decision made the unsurprising (but disappointing) 7-2 decision that Roundup must only follow the EPA’s labeling rules to avoid liability for ‘failure to warn’ injuries, and not whatever juries think should be on the labels. A very odd couple dissented— Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Justice Jackson’s dissent.

It wasn’t a major decision. They didn’t hold that Roundup was globally immune from any injury claims— just claims related to labeling. But SCOTUS knew it was potentially explosive.

Those were the two uncontroversial decisions. The bombs came next.

⚖️ The last two were the pair of immigration cases that CNN’s headline called “major wins” for Trump. TAW! You know what thatmeans. “Major wins” trigger progressive hysteria. The Washington Post’s overwrought headline even suggested the decisions threatened public health:

(Mixed metaphor alert! Immigrants ‘brace’ for impact, not fallout. Like, the impact of being thrown in an ICE van. For fallout, they need to wear a radiation suit or something. Come on, guys. Probably a rushed headline.)

The New York Times published this alarming guest essay based on the immigration decisions, broadening them into a dystopian theme of diabolical authoritarianism once again descending on the country and causing the ‘sunset of democracy’ or whatever:

(This headline was also rushed. First, unshackling presumes the presidency isshackled to begin with, and that shackling is a good thing. But who or what shackled the presidency to begin with? The Deep State? It never says. Second, aren’t shackles something you put on slaves? How could that be a good thing?)

In the pair’s first decision, the Court explained what the word “arrived” meant. Federal law lets foreigners who’ve “arrived” in the U.S. apply for asylum. Activists prefer that “arrived” include migrants reaching any Mexican border town, where NGOs all have asylum offices.

SCOTUS said nope. Arrived means you’re in the house. Or in this case, in the country. They must literally cross the border before they are entitled to apply for asylum.

So that was bad enough; a clear win for Trump. But that first decision was just the local warm-up band. The headliner was next.

⚖️ The second immigration decision set the political world on fire. Oddly, the case doesn’t sound like it should have been an earthquake. Once again, the Court merely defined a common dictionary word, this time the word “temporary.”

If temporary means anything, they opined, applying common sense, it’s that something temporary has to end sometime.

(On an aside, this is the kind of clear-eyed analysis I wish they’d done during the pandemic about all the “temporary” states of covid emergency. Oh well. I suppose some temporary things persist longer than others, like herpes outbreaks. “There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.” — Reagan.)

In the decision, styled Mullin v. Doe, the Court lifted lower court injunctions blocking the Trump Administration from terminating the “temporary protected status” of 350,000 Haitians and a few thousand Syrians. They are not citizens or even applicants for citizenship, but have been here “temporarily” for ages, on the theory that the U.S. is nicer and safer than the third-world hellholes where they came from.

Activist judges had agreed with activist plaintiffs that, while ‘temporary’ doessuggest some kind of ending, Trump is a racist. And if he is a racist, then he shouldn’t be allowed to cancel people’s temporary protected status (TPS).

The Supremes said the activists were looking in the wrong spot. The law “trumps” anyone’s feelings. Then —and this was the hand grenade— it said federal courts shouldn’t meddle in the President’s immigration decisions. Regarding TPS, SCOTUS explained that immigration law both gave the DHS Secretary broad discretion to terminate temporary status and also stated that there is “no judicial review of any determination of the Secretary.”

KABOOM.

⚖️ “The administration is now free to move forward with what immigrants’ rights advocates describe as the largest de-documentation in U.S. history,” the Times piece explained. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called it, “a cruel and inhumane decision; the Supreme Court just turned its back on more than 300,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) pitched a dramatic, grandstanding press conference on SCOTUS’s front porch (see?), calling Mullin v. Doe, without exaggeration, a “horrendous, racist policy of deportation” that was “offensive to everyone on every single level.”

Whew!

The reaction was immediate, sort of crazy, and it was everywhere. NYC’s Boy Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a defiant statement calling SCOTUS’s decision “a cruelty that has become normalized,” pledging solidarity with “Haitian and Syrian brothers and sisters” (even using the Marxist dog whistle ‘solidarity’ three times in less than two minutes), and vowing that the decision was “something that we will not ever accept.”

CLIP: Mamdani vows to defy the Supreme Court (1:45).

Many commenters noted it sounded like Mamdani promised to defy the Supreme Court. Which was weird because Democrats can’t shut up about President Trumpsupposedly defying court orders. But never mind! That’s different.

Anyway, the big-talking Mamdani bragged about how 3 million New Yorkers (out of 8 million) are natives of other countries. He even read out a Mayor’s office emergencytoll-free hotline for any “affected immigrants,” which he repeated twice: 1-800-354-0365.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if that number were clogged with people asking so many silly questions that operators went insane?

Porcine Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also called the decision a blank check (unshackling!) and ‘racist cruelty’, proving that he got the talking points memo:

Remember all the amusing viral mashups from the 2024 election season’s evergreen story about Haitian TPS immigrants in Illinois, crashing into school buses, harvesting geese from city parks, and eating locals’ pets. In tearful tirades at city council meetings, multiple residents reported Haitian petnapping was happening. But Springfield’s police chief and part-time slumlord (he owns two dozen migrant rental houses whose rent is paid by federal tax dollars) “debunked” the story. So.

CLIP: “They’re Eating the Dogs, Eating the Cats” (1:57).

⚖️ I’m telling you: pay attention to this. For some reason, this story about a relatively small group of affected Haitians is still huge. As we’ve now seen, corporate media, far-leftists, and rank-and-file Democrats are all squealing like slaughtered pigs. What in Hades is going on?

First of all, it’s historic in ways that might escape casual notice. SCOTUS just unraveled a longstanding, secret law that Democrats used to sneak in large numbers of illegals, but legally. Yesterday, activist Guerline Jozef, the founder of an NGO called the Haitian Bridge Alliance, explained the big picture. Listen to the whole thing; it’s important (and it’s less than 60 seconds).

CLIP: Haitian activist explains what ‘temporary’ means (0:52).

Temporary has always been interpreted more like indefinitely. “We have TPS holders who have been in this country, calling the U.S. home for the past 10, 15, 20 years,” Guerline said. Twenty years! Who even needs citizenship, when TPS is available?

“They are our doctors, caregivers, attorneys, taxi drivers,” she continued.

Wait, what? Doctors and attorneys? Those jobs require licenses. To get a license to practice law, applicants must graduate from a credentialed law school (a three-year, full-time program) and then pass a state bar exam. Medical licenses are even more demanding.

So… how are ‘temporary’ refugee residents —noncitizens— getting professional licenses that take years of effort for citizens to obtain?

In other words, this clever progressive wordplay has been concealing illegals for a long time. TPS was the secret sauce for how Biden quickly brought people into the country in large numbers and long-term, despite any pesky ‘problems’ precluding real citizenship applications (like criminal histories).

But yesterday’s decision was the first real reduction in the TPS laws in, well, forever. Which brings us to the second dangerous point for Democrats. If it’s okay for the Administration to end TPS status for Haitians and Syrians because courts must refrain from meddling, then it is also okay to end TPS for residents of 17 other countries, which is over a million more noncitizens who are absolutely not voting in elections, perish the thought.

⚖️ As I explained, the Court has essentially held that federal courts have no businessreviewing the administration’s decision to terminate TPS. That is a structural precedent: it swells presidential discretion (“unshackling”) over a major immigration program and shrinks judicial checks.

Most importantly: this SCOTUS decision affects all future administrations and countries (not just Haiti and Syria).

Don’t miss the staggering implication: President Trump is finding ‘Plan B’ strategies to make his executive orders permanent, without needing new laws from Congress. He’s driving the migrant bus around the uncooperative legislative branch to the courthouse.

Since Republicans in the Senate won’t help, Trump is getting help from a surprising source: Democrat lawfare. Whenever the Supreme Court decides a case, it makes binding law. Thus, future presidents can’t just reverse Trump’s executive orders, since the legal precedent has confirmed them.

Trump’s team realized there are two sources for law: the Legislative branch andthe Judicial branch. He’s not bothering much with the messy, delayed, and often unsatisfying business of lawmaking in the House and Senate sausage factories.

That’s why the Democrats and their socialist allies are so upset. They should have kept out of all the lawfare, but they just can’t help themselves. It’s like an OCD. But they are starting to catch on now, waking up to how Trump is using their reflexive litigation against them.

For example, yesterday, Gavin “Slick Willy 2.0” Newsom —discussing his 2028 run on his own podcast— said the Court needs to be expanded to 13 Justices. “We gotta win; we gotta consolidate power,” he explained. He talked about Court packing more than he did about Democrats needing to win back the House or Senate.

CLIP: Newsom calls for Supreme Court reform and expansion (0:56).

⚖️ Finally, let’s tie some threads together. How about something really cool to think about? President Trump has often said he’d pass the SAVE Act by executive order if Congress doesn’t. Nobody knew what he meant. But here’s the thing— federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections. That law is already on the books.

The problem is, apart from a handful of red states, nobody bothers to enforce that federal law. Well, guess what?

Last year, President Trump issued an executive order to proactively enforce existing election law by requiring states to verify legal ID for voting. Then, of course, Democrats sued in several blue jurisdictions. The cases are working their way through several courts right now. Many cases mean many shots on the SCOTUS goal.

In fact, and coincidentally, this week, Trump lost in a liberal Massachusetts court:

The decision teed that particular case up for appeal, which puts it on track for SCOTUS review.

Among other proposed changes, President Trump’s order would require people to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, prevent mail ballots from being counted if they arrive after Election Day, even if they were postmarked by then, and punish non-compliant states by withholding federal money.

Next, imagine that the Supreme Court upholds parts or all of Trump’s executive order as constitutional. That would take even more shackles off the President and allow him to enforce existing laws, which is literally the Executive Branch’s primary purpose.

One of the ways Trump upholds his “Trump always wins” brand is through maintaining multiple paths to victory. This week’s SCOTUS decisions already set the progressive world afire. I can’t wait to find out what next week will deliver.

Have a fantastic Friday! Tune back in tomorrow morning, for the Weekend Edition’s roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.