Supreme Court deals Trump 2 major legal victories for his immigration agenda

President Donald Trump.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued multiple rulings that hand President Trump critical legal victories in order to pursue the aggressive immigration agenda that was a bedrock of his 2024 campaign platform. 

In a 6-3 ruling unveiled Thursday morning, the nation's top court overturned a lower court's ruling that prevented immigration officials from turning away so-called asylum seekers at the border, although officials were reportedly using other strategies in order to prevent such entries at the southern border, where such claims are most frequent.  

“A guest does not arrive in a house when he knocks on the front door,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his opinion, according to The Associated Press. Sonia Sotomayor, in an astonishing dissent, accused her six colleagues who sided with the Trump administration of "regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty."

Also on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that Trump could roll back deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian citizens living in the U.S., mostly allowed into the country during the Biden administration.

In June 2024, then-President Joe Biden gave temporary protected status to 309,000 Haitians, according to NBC News, on top of about 40,000 he'd previously allowed to enjoy protected status. The same year, Biden also gave more than 6,000 Syrians protected status in the U.S. During the 2024 presidential race, Trump had argued that large numbers of migrants forced into American communities by the Biden administration had a destabilizing effect on communities around the country, a sentiment a large number of American voters agreed with. 

The ruling also overrules lower courts that had attempted to stymie Trump's immigration agenda, and will allow for a swift end to protected status. The court's liberal justices echoed a familiar phrase in dissenting with the ruling, accusing the Trump administration of racism, The Associated Press reported. Watch a clip from Fox News below for more on the story.