By the narrowest possible margin, the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Barbara preserved birthright citizenship—for now.  In a concurrence with the form of King Solomon’s judgment but without its wisdom, Brett Kavanaugh split the baby of birthright citizenship in half, rejecting the majority’s finding on the Constitution along with Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, but agreeing with the majority that the executive order was unlawful on statutory grounds.  The vagueness of his “relevantly similar” language for future legislative denials of citizenship makes it far too easy for a hostile Congress to create a multitiered system of belonging much like countries without birthright citizenship.  A future America with multiple generations born and raised here but without any say in how they are governed would be the result.

One common thread between Supreme Court rulings impacting black people and other people of color is the way their technical reasoning yields results which are indifferent to their humanity.  Last week, this court ruled in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety that the plaintiff—a devout, black Rastafarian who was forcibly restrained and had his dreadlocks sheared from his head—could not sue prison officials for this egregious violation of his religious freedom.   This same court which barely preserved birthright citizenship gutted judicial review of terminations of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in Mullin v. Doe, a decision which places hundreds of thousands of Haitians legally present in this country at risk of deportation along with 6000 Syrians. This is the court that Chuck Schumer jumped on social media to cheer as some great example of a check on Trump’s power. With judicial review not required, nothing prevents the Trump administration from canceling TPS (or allowing it to expired) for El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, Venezuela, and Ukraine.

The Supreme Court's earlier ruling in Louisiana v. Callais to kill Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in all but name, on top of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021) and Shelby County v. Holder (2013) don’t just shift the electoral playing field further in favor of the GOP, but further toward the pre-civil rights era of American apartheid where black citizens were obliged to obey laws from governments which refused them protection and equality under them.  Along with Trump’s executive branch and the GOP-controlled legislature, the federal government is trying to turn me and people like me into de facto U.S. nationals—people who cannot exercise voting rights at the federal level and cannot hold federal office—despite the law saying we are U.S. citizens.  

Beyond the Supreme Court, we’ve watched Trump’s executive branch subject people of color to mass detention without trial domestically—in facilities like Camp East Montana, and the recently-closed Alligator Alcatraz (shuttered for cost, not conscience)—and abroad in places like El Salvador’s CECOT.  Human Rights Watch has found that the mortality rate in ICE custody has more than doubled since January 2025.  The Supreme Court enabled third country deportations with shadow docket rulings on two separate occasions in the past year. A refugee program which accepted roughly 100,000 people from all over the world in the final year of Biden’s administration has virtually collapsed. May 2026 marked the sixth consecutive month where the only refugees the United States accepted were white South Africans, admitted on the basis of a false and racist conspiracy theory about white genocide there.  These are the stakes of Fall 2026 election and every election after: will the GOP be allowed to continue creating the white ethnostate they want, or will we stop them?