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The Supreme Court Just Heeded One of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Sharpest Dissents

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17.03.2026

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On Monday, the Supreme Court did something surprising: With no noted dissents, the justices refused to let the Trump administration immediately revoke Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 immigrants from Haiti and Syria. Instead, the court allowed these immigrants to continue living and working in the United States legally while it reviews the government’s arguments that it can strip them of protections overnight. The justices, in other words, will decide this case the proper way—with full briefing, oral arguments, deliberation, and an opinion—rather than over the shadow docket, with little or no explanation. And hundreds of thousands of law-abiding noncitizens will remain protected from deportation in the meantime.

No one is more vindicated by this unusual exercise of judicial restraint than Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. For 10 months, Jackson has been fighting her colleagues’ callous treatment of immigrants whose legal status was abruptly terminated by the Trump administration. At times, she has been the lone justice willing to speak out. In one extraordinary dissent, she alone castigated the conservative supermajority for its “grave misuse” of the shadow docket to privilege the “bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our government has promised them.” These condemnations may well have shamed the court into doing exactly what Jackson urged: resolve this dispute through the ordinary process—while maintaining the status quo for immigrants—rather than issuing another snap judgment for the administration that upends hundreds of thousands of lives.

President Donald Trump’s attack on TPS is one of the most far-reaching nativist policies of his second term. The program, which Congress created in 1990, allows immigrants already living in the U.S. to remain and work here legally when dangerous conditions in their country, like armed conflict and natural disasters, make it unsafe to return. When Trump returned to office, the Department of Homeland Security had designated 17 countries for TPS, covering about 1.3 million immigrants. These designations can last for up to 18 months, and may then be renewed or “terminated.” Upon her confirmation, then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem sought to end TPS for many countries. But some of the previous administration’s designations were not set to expire for........

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