The Roberts Court closes the courthouse door — and the border

Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court has eight more cases to decide this term. Some of the biggest ones remain, including birthright citizenship. Before we get the next, but likely not the last, batch of rulings on Monday morning, let’s highlight what the GOP-appointed majority did in this week’s two decision days, on Tuesday and Thursday.

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The court started the week Monday with its routine order list that functions as a snapshot of the court’s priorities. These lists are where the justices say which new cases they’re taking up and, as important, which cases they’re rejecting. In typical fashion, this week’s list featured the right and left wings of the court dissenting from their colleagues’ refusal to hear cases important to their sides.

For example, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the rejection of a government petition that questioned defendant-friendly considerations of race in police stops. Meanwhile, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the court’s refusal to intervene in a capital case “creates a significant risk” that a death row prisoner’s rights will be violated.

It takes four justices to grant review, so let’s now turn to cases that got that review this term and were decided this week. In a barrage of 6-3 rulings, the Roberts Court closed the courthouse door on claimed rights violations while curbing asylum and humanitarian protections for migrants seeking refuge in this country.

On Tuesday, nearly all the rulings were 6-3 splits, with the GOP-appointed justices in the majority and the Democratic appointees dissenting. Thomas and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh authored respective rulings restricting the rights of immigrants, prisoners and alleged torture victims, while letting a U.S. oil giant sue over seized property in Cuba.

Tuesday’s dissenters said the majority made “no sense” in the immigration ruling, left state prisoners “remediless” if their religious rights are violated, closed the door on “virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law” and failed to apply laws “as Congress wrote them.”

On Thursday, Alito published three opinions: one striking down a Hawaii gun law, another letting the government turn away asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border and a third clearing the way to end humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians. All three cases split the court 6-3 along the party lines of the presidents who appointed the justices.

Thursday’s dissenters said those rulings protected guns rather than “consistently preserving any principle of law,” blessed the administration’s “decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution” and consigned hundreds of thousands of migrants “to devastating, and indeed life-threatening, injury.”