Immigration Matters is a recurring series by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that analyzes the court’s immigration docket, highlighting emerging legal questions about new policy and enforcement practices.

Requests for asylum typically include complex descriptions of violence and fear followed by flight to the United States. In immigration courts, it falls on immigration judges to decide whether the facts on the ground are what the asylum applicant claims them to be. If they are, immigration judges must determine whether immigration law extends safe harbor to the applicant. Earlier this month, a unanimous Supreme Court decided, in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, that federal appellate courts must defer to immigration judges and their colleagues who hear appeals. Although that decision may sound somewhat technical, it has major consequences: The court’s decision puts more responsibility on decision-makers who are stretched thin by mounting caseloads, while making it more difficult for migrants to ask federal appellate courts to overturn asylum denials.

Welcome to SCOTUSblog’s recurring series in which we interview experts on different supreme courts around the world and how they compare to our own. For our debut column, we covered the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Today we visit our northern neighbor with the help of Professor Adam Dodek, a scholar and frequent commentator on the Supreme Court of Canada.  

Empirical SCOTUS is a recurring series by Adam Feldman that looks at Supreme Court data, primarily in the form of opinions and oral arguments, to provide insights into the justices’ decision making and what we can expect from the court in the future.

In last year’s TikTok v. Garland, the Supreme Court confronted a statute threatening to ban one of America’s most popular social media platforms. The court’s per curiam opinion rejecting TikTok’s emergency application opened with a familiar constitutional refrain: “At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” The citation? The 1994 case of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law giving the president the power to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats, did not give President Donald Trump the authority to impose sweeping tariffs in a series of 2025 executive orders. The vote was 6-3, with the court’s Democratic appointees joining Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett to strike down the tariffs.

Although the ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump was a landmark one, it left a variety of questions open – some of which I explore below.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday afternoon that it will hear oral argument on whether the Trump administration can end a program that allows several thousand Syrians and approximately 350,000 Haitians to live in the United States temporarily. In a brief, unsigned order, the justices left in place rulings by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that had indefinitely postponed the termination of the program, known as the Temporary Protected Status program, for Syrian and Haitian nationals. But the justices granted a pair of requests from the Trump administration to weigh in on the merits of the dispute over the administration’s efforts to end the TPS program for those nationals without waiting for federal appeals courts to do so first, as is the normal procedure.

The court will hear oral arguments in Noem v. Doe, the challenge to the termination of the TPS program for Syrian nationals, and Trump v. Miot, the challenge to the termination of the program for Haitian nationals, during the second week of its April argument session, which runs from April 27 through April 29. A decision in the two cases, which will be combined and treated as one for purposes of oral argument and the court’s eventual ruling, is likely to follow by late June or early July.