Announcement of opinions for Tuesday, March 31

The Supreme Court on Friday morning announced that it will hear arguments on April 29 – the last day of the court’s April argument session, and the last day of regularly scheduled oral arguments – on the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Temporary Protected Status program for several thousand Syrians and roughly 350,000 Haitians currently living in the United States.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Tuesday in Pitchford v. Cain, the case of a Mississippi man who contends that he was sentenced to death in violation of the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination in jury selection. Terry Pitchford asserts that such a constitutional violation “undermines the foundational promise of equal justice under law.” But Mississippi counters that this is not one of the “narrow circumstances” in which federal courts can grant state prisoners post-conviction relief.

On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in one of the highest-profile cases of the 2025-26 term – and indeed, one of the biggest cases in several years. Trump v. Barbara is a challenge to President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. All of the lower courts that have weighed in so far have ruled that the order is unconstitutional, but the Trump administration contends that those rulings – as well as the longstanding view that virtually everyone born in the United States is entitled to U.S. citizenship – are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution. The challengers counter that the Trump administration “is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our Nation’s constitutional foundations” – one that “would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”

After completing a term of imprisonment, federal criminal defendants often serve terms of supervised release that usually last between one to five years, depending on the offense for which they were convicted. Isabel Rico pleaded guilty to federal drug trafficking offenses and was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment followed by four years of supervised release. Rico violated her terms of supervised release several times, including near the end of her term of supervision. She stopped reporting to her probation officer, stopped living at the address she gave her probation officer, and absconded. After her term of supervision expired and while she was a fugitive, she also committed new crimes.

The president finds the long-settled meaning of the citizenship clause to be an intolerable obstacle to his agenda. The reason? Each year it would make U.S. citizens of tens of thousands of people who do not fit his racial and cultural ideal of what it means to be an “American.” So what does he do? His administration simply re-defines the citizenship clause to exclude those people – without seeking to amend the Constitution or even get the approval of Congress. What will the Supreme Court do about it?

But enough about the McKinley administration.