WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has concluded a term marked by deeply divisive rulings on race and discrimination, with decisions that legal experts say could leave a lasting mark on American politics and society.
The justices found themselves at odds — sometimes sharply critical of one another — in a series of cases that stripped away key parts of a major voting rights law, permitted the government to end certain immigration protections, and took on the long-standing legal principle of birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to immigrant parents.
These rulings arrive at a time when national conversations about race, identity, immigration, and the fairness of anti-discrimination policies are intensifying across the country.
Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration, told the Associated Press that the court has been moving aggressively. “This term, we saw a Supreme Court that is moving quickly to eradicate legal protections in ways that will leave vulnerable communities exposed to the harsh winds of discrimination and hatred that we continue to see across the country today,” she said.
Here is a closer look at the major decisions and what they could mean going forward:
Deportation Protections for Haitians and Syrians
The court gave the green light for the government to end deportation protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals who had come to the United States fleeing violence and natural disasters. President Donald Trump’s administration had revoked that temporary protected status last year.
Attorneys representing affected migrants argued that the cancellation of those protections was driven, at least in part, by racial bias. They pointed to Trump’s long record of making disparaging remarks about immigrants from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East as evidence. Geoffrey Pipoly, a lawyer for the Haitian nationals in the case — known as Mullin v. Doe — made the argument directly during oral arguments in April. “The true reason for the termination is the president’s racial animus towards non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” Pipoly said. Attorneys also noted that Trump, during his second presidential campaign, claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and suggested in another instance that migrants have “bad genes.”
Federal officials denied that racial prejudice played any role, arguing that the temporary protected status program was always meant to be short-term but had stretched on for more than a decade in some instances.
Writing for the 6-3 conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito concluded that none of the statements cited by the plaintiffs was “overtly racial,” reasoning that Trump’s actions could have been taken without racial motivation and characterizing the anti-immigrant remarks as “political discourse.”
The court’s liberal minority saw it very differently. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The references — of filth, disease, and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.”
Birthright Citizenship Upheld
In one of the most closely watched cases of the term, the court reaffirmed that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to all people born on U.S. soil.
On his first day back in office last year, Trump signed an executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship to the children of U.S. citizens. Civil rights organizations challenged the order as both unconstitutional and racially motivated.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, traced the history of birthright citizenship from its roots in English common law through its formal inclusion in the 14th Amendment. Roberts acknowledged that race and citizenship had been fiercely contested throughout American history — in courtrooms, in Congress, in public debate, and on battlefields — largely because of Black Americans’ struggle to be freed from slavery.
Freed Black Americans did not receive citizenship as a “reward,” Roberts wrote, but because “the Amendment recognized their rightful claim to birthright citizenship simply and solely by virtue of their having been born on American soil.”
The 6-3 ruling was a setback for the Trump administration, which has made restricting immigration a central priority. U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer had argued before the court in April that “the clause does not extend citizenship to the children of temporary visa holders or illegal aliens.”
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with that position and wrote in his dissent that African descendants of enslaved people occupy a unique legal category separate from children born to tourists or those in the country without legal status. “Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority,” Thomas wrote.
In an unusual move, liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor jointly pushed back on Thomas’s reasoning. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery,” they wrote together.
Voting Rights Act Weakened
In a ruling handed down in April, the court significantly weakened a key section of the Voting Rights Act — the law designed to protect minority voters from disenfranchisement. Among the tools that law had provided was the ability to require the creation of majority-minority congressional districts.
Justice Alito, writing for the majority, concluded that because race and partisan voting patterns are so closely linked, it would be unfair to automatically label a partisan redrawing of congressional maps as racially discriminatory, since other motivations could be at play.
Alito wrote that in states where both political parties have significant support and where race often tracks with party preference, partisan players can “easily exploit” laws designed to protect minority political participation for dishonest purposes.
The liberal justices rejected that logic and accused the conservative majority of undermining minority representation. Justice Kagan warned in her dissent that the consequences would be severe. “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the states where that law continues to matter — the states still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting — minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process,” she wrote, adding that “the consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave.”
The ruling has already had a significant impact, with nearly a dozen Southern states moving quickly to redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-Black districts.
