Supreme Court Clears Way for Mass Deportations

Here are the top news stories for the week of June 21, 2026.

#1. Mass deportations (new)

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants from Haiti and Syria currently living in the US under what's known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

TPS was passed as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 under President George H. W. Bush. It offered nationals or residents of other countries experiencing violence like armed conflict or dangerous conditions like natural disasters to live and work in the US legally. Notably, the program did not and never has offered a path to permanent residency. TPS is granted for 18 months and can be extended based on conditions in the person's home country. The program is run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and decisions about which countries qualify should be made in coordination with the State Department. That last part is going to matter in a minute…

After a massive earthquake in Haiti that killed an estimated 300,000 people, the Obama administration granted TPS for Haitians. The protection has been extended several times because of ongoing violence and political unrest in the country. There are an estimated 350,000 Haitians in the US living under TPS.

An estimated 6,100 Syrians live in the US under TPS. They were granted protections in 2012 during that country's civil war, which in 2024 led to the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The government argued that the protections offered under TPS were never meant to be permanent, and it's gone on so long for Haitians and Syrians that it's become "de facto amnesty."

Lawyers for the immigrants said that sending these people back would result in "thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths." They also cited Trump's racist comments about Haitian people specifically as proof that the decision was not based on any realities on the ground — but out of animus.

Lower courts had ruled against the Trump administration, citing their failure to follow the proper protocols when they revoked TPS for Haiti and Syria — including that DHS consult with the State Department on what the actual conditions in a country are.

The Supreme Court's six conservative justices reversed them, essentially saying that the courts can't overrule what government agencies have already decided — including revoking TPS for certain groups.

On Trump's comments, the Court’s majority said little. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito "brushed aside arguments that Trump's derogatory comments about Haitians showed the decision was unlawfully tinged by prejudice. He called the statements "insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.’”

Writing for the dissent, "Justice Elena Kagan forcefully disagreed, calling Trump's comments 'so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.' Her dissent pointed out that Trump had said Haitians in the U.S. 'probably have AIDS,' and he also amplified false rumors during the 2024 campaign that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating dogs and cats."

"Immigration advocates say the ruling will send TPS recipients scrambling to find other legal pathways to stay in the US or become deportable under Trump's mass deportation drive. Given that both countries have been designated for TPS for over a decade, the decision also raises the spectre of family separation, particularly for parents with children born in the US," Al Jazeera reports.

An estimated 1 million people from 15 other countries live in the US under TPS. The Court's ruling makes it possible for the Trump administration to revoke their legal status for seemingly no reason at all.

Related:

• The same day as the TPS decision, the Supreme Court revived asylum "metering," ruling that migrants can't apply for asylum until they set foot on US soil. Alito wrote that "a guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door"; Sotomayor, reading her dissent from the bench, said the Court chose to "slam the door shut" and "more people will die."
• Two days earlier, a federal appeals court reinstated nationwide "expedited removal," letting immigration agents deport undocumented people from anywhere in the US without a hearing before a judge.

2) Election Interference

Federal courts blocked the administration's efforts to interfere with the midterm elections on four fronts this week. But as we've seen with court rulings, these can be flipped at any time. The Trump administration also introduced a new method to coerce states into making it harder for citizens to vote — withholding disaster aid.

• A judge blocked the administration from building a database merging Americans' Social Security numbers with citizenship status. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote that the government had "knowingly trampled" on privacy in a way that threatened "the sacred right to vote" — and noted that some eligible voters had already been wrongly flagged as noncitizens and dropped from the rolls.
• Judge Denise Casper permanently struck down Trump's executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register and barring states from counting late-arriving mail ballots. Her reasoning was blunt: the president "lacks authority over elections."
• A federal appeals court refused to let the Justice Department seize Michigan's voter rolls.
• Judge Indira Talwani blocked Trump from ordering the Postal Service to limit who receives a mail ballot, protecting voters in the 23 states and D.C. that sued.
• CNN reports that a draft DHS rule would withhold 20% of homeland-security grants — more than $1 billion for terrorism prevention and disaster prep — from states that won't switch to hand-marked paper ballots and run their voters through that same flawed citizenship database.

Related:

• Trump is still holding two unrelated things hostage — the FISA surveillance law and a popular bipartisan housing bill — until Congress passes the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to vote.

The midterms are 134 days away.

3) Israel - Lebanon

Israel, Lebanon and the US signed a trilateral framework agreement at the State Department on Friday. The headlines read as if this was a “breakthrough” but if you read the deal… it’s really not.

It does not mandate Israel withdrawal from the roughly 20% of Lebanese land that it occupies. Instead, it allows Israel to continue to occupy that land on which it has and continues to commit warfare based on unsubstantiated claims and accusations. The deal lays out a "sequenced process" for the Lebanese army to retake territory pending the "verified disarmament" of Hezbollah (whatever that means).

Hezbollah rejects that condition and referred to the deal as a “surrender.”

Rubio called the agreement a "clear and structured process to restore Lebanon's sovereignty" but this requires Israel's good faith adherence to the deal… and for good reason, neither Hezbollah nor the Lebanese are confident that will happen.

The numbers — more than one million forcibly displaced and more than 4,000 people killed — suggest that Israel's intentions and actions go beyond their stated goal of disarming and eliminating Hezbollah. Add to that, the conflicting statements from Israeli politicians: The day before the talks wrapped, Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israeli forces would stay in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza "without any time limit."

“With hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, mainly Shi'ite Muslims, still ​unable to return to homes in Israeli-occupied areas, anger over the agreement spread beyond Hezbollah to Shi'ites more widely. The Amal movement of Lebanon's ‌highest-ranking Shi'ite ⁠politician, parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, denounced the agreement as unbalanced, and said it would entrench conditions favouring Israel,” Reuters reports.

4) War on Iran

Last weekend, Vice President JD Vance was flying to Geneva to hammer out details of a deal with Iran. Within a week, that deal began fraying before both sides agreed to meet again this Tuesday. Let's rewind:

• At the end of last weekend's talks, the US and Iran had agreed to a road map leading to a final agreement within 60 days.
• Since Thursday, the US and Iran had been launching attacks again. It started when a projectile reportedly hit a vessel trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The US blamed Iran, although Iran never claimed it was responsible. The US then hit Iranian targets, and the IRGC retaliated with strikes on US assets in Bahrain and Kuwait.
• Back to his old mind games, Trump warned Saturday he may be "forced to militarily complete the job," after which "the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!"
• By Sunday evening, Axios reported that the two sides had agreed to halt strikes and meet again Tuesday — now relocated to Doha, Qatar — over competing readings of the Strait of Hormuz portion of the deal.
  

Related

• On Tuesday, the Senate passed a War Powers resolution 50-48, with four Republicans crossing over, directing Trump to halt hostilities against Iran unless Congress authorizes them.
• Trump was pissed. He summoned Senate Republicans to a closed-door lunch and, by multiple accounts, lit into them. Senator Bill Cassidy described a shouting match: "You have not told the American people what's going on," he told the president, noting the war "was supposed to last four weeks" and has lasted four months. "I'm not going to be bullied. I am voting for war powers until I get a briefing." Senator John Kennedy said Trump was "mad as a murder hornet." Two days later, a chastened GOP held a second, symbolic vote rejecting a nearly identical measure. Senator Tim Kaine said the new vote was "of no consequence."
• Trump has now asked Congress for $87.6 billion in emergency funding — including $21 billion to replace missiles used in the war — for a conflict it never authorized and continues to try to stop.

• Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte — a Trump loyalist and former housing-finance official with no intelligence background — on Tuesday fired dozens of officials including much of the senior staff of the National Intelligence Council, the unit that writes the government's nonpartisan threat assessments. Even more concerning, Pulte has hired former RNC staffer Christina Norton as his chief of staff, The New York Times reports. Norton is known for working with election deniers and conspiracy theorists
  • “Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms,” MS NOW reports.
  • As "acting" director, Pulte can hold the job without Senate confirmation into January 2027 — past the November midterms, giving him just enough time to do Trump’s bidding and there’s nothing Democrats can do about it.
• Eight people convicted in an attack on a Texas immigration-detention center were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years — the first terrorism prosecution under Trump's declaration that "antifa" is a domestic terrorist organization, a designation that has no basis in U.S. law. The sentences dwarf anything from January 6th, where the longest was 22 years — for a man Trump later pardoned. To be clear, this was not a peaceful protest — one defendant shot a guard, who survived. But if you compare this to January 6 — it looks like we are now creating a justice system with two different tiers for similar crimes.

• Trump's freshly repainted reflecting pool is peeling and turning green with algae. The administration has arrested or cited at least ten people for "vandalism," with Trump claiming, without evidence, that someone cut a huge” gash" in it and have caused the algae and peeling paint. But, reporters at the scene couldn't find the gash and the algae was back before the government claimed someone cut the lining. The White House ordered a giant fence to block off access to the pool, which is now scheduled to be drained and refilled after the July 4th holiday.
• At a closed-door GOP gathering Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson warned members that if Republicans lose the House, Democrats will investigate "the president's family, the cabinet, his donors" — then added, "I run the protection program. We'll take care of you." Congress is supposed to check and balance the Executive Branch... Johnson is describing the opposite.