The Roberts Court has completed the decades-long “demolition” of the Voting Rights Act, a crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement.
That was Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent to the conservative supermajority’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which already has been viewed by Republicans throughout the American South as a permission slip to begin dismantling minority-majority districts.
“Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter,” Kagan wrote, referring to the part of the statute protecting Black and minority voting power. “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.”
On the day that the Act’s death knell was sounded, the Supreme Court heard another significant case that could determine whether the Trump administration can strip the legal protections of 1.3 million immigrants on a whim.
Immigration expert Andrea Flores, who worked as a White House and Department of Homeland Security lawyer during the Obama administration, helped unpack the historical states of both cases on Substack Live.
Here’s what you should know about the half-hour conversation:
‘Things have changed’
Throughout Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, the six conservatives repeat the refrain that the protections of the Voting Rights Act are no longer necessary in the wake of its successes.
It’s been the refrain of conservative justices in voting rights cases since Shelby County v. Holder, in which Chief Justice John Roberts gutted Section 5 of the Act in 2013.
Roberts said then, and Alito quoted him saying today, “things have changed dramatically” since the passage of the landmark civil rights law, celebrating the “great strides” in Black representation in the United States and the American South.
Flores noted that this sentiment has been a through-line of a series of Supreme Court decisions weakening the Voting Rights Act, from Shelby County to Brnovich to Callais.
“Once again, we’ve seen the Roberts Court try and say that race doesn’t matter in our politics anymore,” she said.
Flores noted that the Callais case showed the continuing resonance of race in U.S. politics, a redistricted map determined by a court to dilute Black voting power.
“That is what Section 2 was meant to prevent,” she added.
‘Discriminatory intent’
This morning, the Supreme Court also considered whether to let the Trump administration strip legal protections to hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
Unlike Callais, the pair of cases — Mullin v. Dahlia Doe and Trump v. Miot — aren’t about the constitutionality of the underlying statute. The justices are considering whether Trump’s termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations can be reviewed by the courts, and if so, what level of scrutiny by the courts is available.
Flores noted that the cases turned on different issues.
“In the Syrian case, there was a question of had they really done the review post-civil war of how those conditions had changed,” she said. “In the Haitian case, there was more of an argument that the termination itself was driven by discriminatory intent.”
Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson addressed Trump’s tropes about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America and Haitian refugees “eating the dogs,” but the court’s right flank focused more on the technical ability of courts to review these decisions.
Flores noted that such an interpretation “would really give a blank check” for Trump to strip legal status from more than a million people.
Learn more about the consequences of such a decision in the interview at the top of this newsletter.
