Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - The Roberts Court Shows Its True Colors
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4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 27 June 2026
⏱️ 69 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Donald Trump ran for office threatening to use mass deportations, closed borders, and emergency wartime powers to “clean up” American immigration. On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority gifted him with two stunning victories in that crusade—effectively reshaping life for more than a million people living in the country with temporary protected status, or TPS, and forcing asylum seekers to jump through increasingly impossible new hoops. Those decisions came on the heels of Tuesday’s chilling news for green card holders who might want to travel outside the United States in the form of Blanche v. Lau, where that same 6-3 majority ruled that border officers don't need clear and convincing evidence of a crime before throwing permanent residents into legal limbo.
On today’s show: Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern talk with Andrea Flores, founder of Securing America’s Promise and a policy veteran of the White House, National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Senate. Together, they unpack the decisions that made this one of most consequential weeks for immigration law in recent memory. And they note the central theme emerging from SCOTUS’ right-wing supermajority in perfect symmetry with Trumpism: When MAGA does explicit racism, SCOTUS goes conveniently colorblind, as with Justice Alito’s refusal to find racial animus in Trump’s statements about Haitians. The episode closes with a look ahead to next week’s birthright citizenship ruling and why, whatever the outcome, it cannot be allowed to obscure what happened this week.
The term will wrap next week and Amicus will bring you extra episodes and clear-eyed analysis of the final raft of decisions. Slate Plus members can also sign up for our special end-of-term conversation. Join Dahlia and Mark as they unpack this Supreme Court term with some of the smartest legal analysts in the business as part of our live online audience, July 10 at noon EDT. Slate Plus members will also have access to an exclusive Q&A with Dahlia and Mark. Submit your questions now to amicus@slate.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Dahlia Lathway. |
| 0:08.2 | And I'm Mark Joseph Stern. |
| 0:14.8 | An invasion of criminal migrants from prisons and jails, from insane asylums and mental institutions. |
| 0:24.8 | This administration wants immigration itself that status to imply criminality. |
| 0:30.3 | And the Supreme Court is giving it more power to do so. |
| 0:33.3 | And they already have enormous power. |
| 0:35.5 | We have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. They're having fistfights with our police officers right in the middle of streets. But I want every American to know if you think detention is bad now, if you think enforcement is bad, this decision unleashes something we haven't seen because the government has their information and knows exactly where everyone is. Democrats say, please don't call them animals. They're humans. I said, no, they're not |
| 0:57.5 | humans. They're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals. You can't be a conservative. You can't be a |
| 1:01.1 | textualist. You can't believe in the ordinary person's view of the law if you look at those |
| 1:04.8 | statements and don't believe race was involved in this. They're poisoning the blood of our country. |
| 1:09.2 | That's what they've done. |
| 1:24.0 | Donald Trump ran for office threatening to use mass deportations, closed borders, and emergency wartime powers to, quote, clean up America, which she described as a garbage can |
| 1:30.1 | for the world. From the first rendition flights of prisoners to Seacott Torture Prison, to the |
| 1:37.1 | unlawful order rescinding birthright citizenship, to the roving ice raids on courthouses and schools, emiserating, abusing, terrorizing, and humiliating those who had the temerity to seek refuge in a better life in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty has been the goal. |
| 1:56.6 | This past week we learned yet again, as we have seen since the start of Trump's tenure, |
| 2:01.9 | that the conservative supermajority works hand in glove with Stephen Miller, Christy Noem, Mark Wayne Mullen, |
| 2:07.1 | and the other architects of immigration cruelty to ensure that America can again be bleached |
| 2:13.4 | of its multicultural pluralistic impulses. |
| 2:16.7 | This week saw a series of cases handed down from the Roberts Court 6 that made good on Donald Trump's campaign promises |
| 2:23.7 | to ensure that asylum seekers, green card holders, and temporary protected status recipients |
| 2:29.8 | would be left with fewer protections and greater exposure to genuine harms. |
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