The decisions, both written by Justice Samuel Alito and decided 6–3 along ideological lines, reshape the legal architecture of humanitarian protection in America. Taken together, they leave an estimated 356,000 Haitians and Syrians facing imminent loss of their legal status — and open the door to stripping TPS from up to one million people more.

What the Court Did — and What It Means

In Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, the Court ruled that a 1990 statutory review bar blocks virtually all non-constitutional court challenges to TPS terminations. Haitian TPS holders had argued the termination was driven by racial animus — pointing to statements by President Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem about Haitians and other non-white migrants. The Court, applying the Arlington Heights framework, concluded the plaintiffs were unlikely to prevail, citing the administration’s across-the-board policy of ending TPS designations as a facially race-neutral rationale.

Justice Kagan, writing in dissent joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, warned that under the majority’s logic, TPS communities that have lived legally in the United States for decades can have their status revoked through flawed or pretextual processes with no meaningful judicial check.

In the metering case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court held that asylum seekers physically standing in Mexico at a port of entry have not “arrived in the United States” under the Immigration and Nationality Act — and therefore have no statutory right to request asylum. Border officials may now indefinitely prevent migrants from stepping onto U.S. soil, eliminating the legal trigger for asylum processing altogether.

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent aloud from the bench — a signal reserved for decisions the dissenters consider most consequential. She invoked the St. Louis, the ship carrying Jewish refugees turned away before World War II, and accused the majority of allowing agents to evade Congress’s intent by the simple act of physically blocking a human being from crossing a line.

The Numbers Behind the Ruling

Roughly 350,000 Haitians hold TPS, many of them in the United States for more than a decade following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Approximately 6,000 Syrians received TPS amid civil war and the Assad regime’s repression. Both groups had seen their designations repeatedly extended — until the Trump administration, under Executive Order 14159, moved to terminate them in 2025 as part of a sweeping crackdown on humanitarian programs.

Advocates warn the logic extends far beyond Haiti and Syria. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Somalia, and Ethiopia all have long-standing TPS populations. The total exposure: roughly one million people.

The Border Door Closes

The metering ruling revives and expands a policy first formalized under Trump, briefly used under Obama, and rescinded by Biden in 2021. Under the ruling, Customs and Border Protection officers can station themselves at ports of entry — on bridges, in inspection lanes — and simply refuse entry. No step on U.S. soil, no asylum claim. No asylum claim, no protection.

In practice, that means asylum seekers wait in Mexican border cities — Juárez, Tijuana, Matamoros — in encampments long documented for kidnapping, extortion, and cartel violence. The wait is now potentially indefinite. The protection, legally, now nonexistent.

Advocacy groups including the American Immigration Council condemned the ruling as delivering a direct blow to rights Congress wrote into the INA. Lawyers are already signaling they will pivot to non-refoulement arguments, conditions in Mexican camps, and international law — threads the majority left unaddressed.

What Comes Next

DHS can now move ahead with TPS termination notices already published in the Federal Register for both Syria and Haiti. For the southern border, expect Trump’s DHS to formally reinstate and scale physical turnback operations at ports of entry — and watch for guidance from CBP field leadership in the coming days.

On Capitol Hill, advocates are pressing for a congressional fix that would clarify the asylum statute to include people seeking inspection at ports of entry. That fight starts Thursday — and it starts losing.

Justice Sotomayor’s bench statement closed with a question the majority never answered: what happens to the people turned back? The Court, having redrawn the line, offered nothing on what waits on the other side of it.

The Court ruled. The clock is running. Migrant Insider will be in the halls of Congress this week asking the questions these opinions leave unanswered — because someone has to. Paid subscribers are what make that possible. If this story matters to you, make sure we can keep reporting it.

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The Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule Monday that would raise the filing fee for Form N-400 — the application for U.S. naturalization — from $760 to $1,330 for paper filers, and from $710 to $1,280 for those filing online. The fee to appeal a denied citizenship application would jump from $830 to $1,475. The rule was published in the Federal Register on June 22 and opens a 60-day public comment period through August 24.

Those numbers alone would reshape the economics of naturalization for hundreds of thousands of people. But the fine print is where the real damage is.

Who Loses the Most

Right now, immigrants with limited income have two options to reduce the cost of naturalization: a full fee waiver, available to applicants facing financial hardship or receiving certain public benefits, and a reduced $380 filing fee for households earning up to 400% of the federal poverty line. Under the proposed rule, both disappear. The only carveout left standing is a longstanding statutory exemption for active and former military service members.

The administration’s rationale, laid out in the proposed rule, doesn’t hedge: DHS is adopting what it calls a “full-cost, beneficiary-pays” model, meaning applicants must now cover the full processing cost of their own citizenship application — including expanded background checks, interviews, and what the agency describes as ongoing vetting enhancements required by recent executive orders.

“Although DHS has historically limited the fees for naturalization-related applications to fulfill previous administrations’ priorities of encouraging naturalization, DHS no longer believes naturalization benefit requests should get lower fees at the potential expense of other immigration benefits,” the agency wrote in its proposal.

That sentence is worth reading twice. The federal government — for generations a formal proponent of naturalization as a civic and economic good — is now on record saying it is no longer in the business of making citizenship accessible.

The Knock-On Effect

USCIS, which is funded almost entirely by application fees rather than congressional appropriations, acknowledged in its own proposal that higher fees could cause some eligible permanent residents to delay or abandon their citizenship applications altogether — and instead keep renewing their green cards indefinitely.

For low-income immigrants already navigating a system that has grown more hostile to legal status at every level, this is not an abstract possibility. It is the likely outcome. A family of four living at the federal poverty line does not keep $1,330 in a drawer for a filing fee.

Former senior USCIS official Doug Rand, who served during the Biden administration, did not soften his assessment. “The only credible explanation for jacking up citizenship fees in isolation is that Trump 2.0 is in a hurry to create even more undue barriers for legal immigrants,” Rand told CBS News.

Immigration attorney Rosanna Berardi, based in Buffalo, N.Y., was more precise about the pattern. “When you simultaneously raise fees, eliminate waivers, and add new vetting layers like neighborhood checks and expanded ‘good moral character’ scrutiny, you are not streamlining a system,” Berardi told ABC News. “You are building walls inside it.”

What Happens Next

The proposed rule is not yet final. USCIS will accept public comments through August 24 at regulations.gov under docket number USCIS-2026-0265. The agency must review that feedback before issuing a final rule, and current fees — including waivers and the reduced $380 option — remain in effect throughout this process.

But the direction of travel is clear. This proposed rule lands alongside a May USCIS policy memo that made adjustment of status harder to obtain domestically, a State Department pause on immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries, and the $70 billion Secure America Act signed into law June 10. Each piece, taken alone, is a policy change. Taken together, they form a blueprint: tighten legal immigration at every seam, and make the people already here pay more for the privilege of staying.

The comment period closes August 24. The current fees are still in effect. File now, or document why you can’t.

The administration just put in writing that it no longer believes making citizenship affordable is a government priority. That's not spin — it's their language. If that sentence makes you angry, this newsroom is where your money goes. Become a paid subscriber, and send this to one person navigating the naturalization process right now.

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1. Starting today, seeking asylum costs money — every single year.

The Justice Department’s immigration courts started charging mandatory fees for asylum cases on June 11 — and there is no waiver. The Executive Office for Immigration Review finalized a rule imposing both an upfront filing fee and a $102 annual fee for every calendar year an asylum case remains pending before the courts or the Board of Immigration Appeals. Not one dollar of it can be waived, even for people who are broke. Cancellation of removal, a form of relief available to long-term U.S. residents without green cards, now costs $1,640 in combined fees. All payments must flow through an online portal.

The legal theory propping this up is thin. Congress has not passed a statute authorizing per-year asylum fees. The administration is doing this through regulation — pricing asylum out of reach one annual invoice at a time.

Attorneys handling pro bono cases are already running the math on clients who may owe multiple years of back fees the moment they try to move a stalled case forward.

2. Trafficking survivors now need a DOJ permission slip to get a green card on time.

Survivors of human trafficking who hold T visas have a path to permanent residence after three years — but Congress wrote in a shortcut: if the underlying trafficking investigation or prosecution is complete, they can apply sooner. On June 16, the Justice Department proposed formalizing who controls access to that shortcut. The answer is DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, which will now issue — or withhold — the certification letters survivors need to file early. DOJ estimates about 2,000 such requests a year. The comment window closes August 17.

This is a chokepoint, and it is new. Previously, that early-filing pathway existed on paper without a centralized DOJ gatekeeping process attached to it. Now there is one. A trafficking survivor who cannot get that letter — because prosecutors say an investigation isn’t “complete,” or simply because the bureaucracy moves slowly — stays in limbo longer.

Comments are due August 17. Immigration advocates should be in that docket.

3. A new BIA precedent tells people to ask ICE first before asking the court to pause their deportation.

The Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedent decision on June 12 that, going forward, will generally require people with final removal orders to first request a stay of deportation from ICE before the BIA will consider a stay request filed alongside a motion to reopen or reconsider. The case is Matter of Herrera-Nunez, 29 I&N Dec. 691 (BIA 2026).

The rationale is docket management. The result is a procedural default that redirects the most vulnerable people in the immigration system — those already ordered deported, trying to reopen cases based on new relief — directly toward the enforcement agency trying to remove them. ICE charges a fee for stay requests, though it can be waived. The BIA cited its crushing caseload. That caseload is real. But this rule means that for many people, the courthouse door only opens after ICE says no.

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That’s how federal agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations and the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General showed up at the Washington offices of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights — and two other nonprofits representing unaccompanied immigrant children — during a 48-hour sweep on or around June 11–12, 2026.

They wanted client files. They wanted financial records. They wanted information about children.

They didn’t get any of it.

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They arrived quietly — in court filings, regulatory agendas, and the dense columns of the Federal Register — the way most of the immigration system’s most consequential moves do. Not in a press conference. Not in a tweet. In the bureaucratic dark.

Here’s what you need to know.

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The new law splits the money explicitly between the two agencies at the center of the crackdown: $38 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $26 billion for Customs and Border Protection, and $5 billion for broader Department of Homeland Security operations.

Because it moved through reconciliation, Republicans cleared it with simple majorities in both chambers, sidestepping a Senate Democratic filibuster and resolving the multi-month funding impasse that triggered a partial DHS shutdown this spring. The Senate passed the package late last week. The…

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On Sunday, a federal judge in Boston confirmed what immigration lawyers, university counsel, and hospital HR departments had been arguing since September: the fee was never legal to begin with.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin struck down the $100,000 charge in a 42-page ruling, finding that President Trump had imposed a de facto tax on H-1B visa petitions without any authorization from Congress — and without following the basic rule-making procedures the law requires.

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The money is moving on three tracks simultaneously, and understanding how they fit together is how you understand what is actually being built.

Track One: The One Big Beautiful Bill’s Shadow

Last year, Congress passed H.R. 1 — the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act — and with it, injected roughly $170 billion into immigration and border enforcement through fiscal year 2029. The money was folded into reconciliation, a process that bypasses the Senate filibuster, and it landed without a single Democratic vote mattering.

The breakdown: approximately $75 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $65 billion for Customs and Border Protection, and another $22 billion to $30 billion in related DHS border activity. That money is already obligated. It is already being spent. ICE is already using it to build out detention infrastructure — analysts project at least 125,000 new beds and roughly 10,000 additional officers before the funding runs dry.

That was last year.

Track Two: The Secure America Act — $70 Billion More

The Senate has now passed a second reconciliation package, branded the Secure America Act, that would layer approximately $69.5 billion in new mandatory budget authority on top of what OBBBA already delivered.

ICE would receive $38.5 billion. CBP would receive $22.6 billion. Another $3.5 billion would go to border technology. Five billion more lands at DHS overall. The funds are appropriated in fiscal year 2026 but available to spend through 2029 — again mirroring the OBBBA structure and again designed to insulate the agencies from future congressional fights.

The strategy is deliberate. By converting what has historically been discretionary spending into multi-year mandatory funding, Republicans are effectively removing ICE and CBP from the annual appropriations process — the one lever Congress has traditionally used to impose conditions, demand oversight, or withhold money when agencies misbehave. Future Congresses lose that tool. Future administrations inherit an enforcement machine that runs on autopilot.

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That is the money trail running through New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Democratic primary challenger Avila Chevalier has made opposition to immigration enforcement the centerpiece of her campaign — while the largest single funder of outside spending on her behalf donated $100,000 to the Texas governor whose migrant-busing operation dumped thousands of people onto the streets of New York City in winter.

The Donor, the PAC, the Half-Million

A super PAC called American Priorities launched a $500,000 media buy earlier this cycle supporting Avila Chevalier in her challenge to Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., according to Federal Election Commission filings. The group has pledged roughly $2 million across a handful of New York House races, with approximately half earmarked for NY-13.

American Priorities’ most significant individual funder is Hussein Mahrouq, a Texas businessman who has contributed at least $525,000 to the PAC — the money driving its New York ad campaign, according to reporting by Jewish Insider.

In 2024, Texas state campaign finance records show Mahrouq gave $100,000 to Abbott’s political operation and $25,000 to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He has also financially backed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Thomas Massie.

What Abbott Did With That Money

Through Operation Lone Star, Abbott bused tens of thousands of migrants from Texas to New York City, Chicago, and Washington — often without advance notice, in winter, using human beings as instruments of political theater. New York bore some of the sharpest consequences: emergency shelters overwhelmed, families left on sidewalks, children separated from services.

The communities of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx that make up NY-13 — heavily Dominican, heavily immigrant — organized against exactly that enforcement architecture. Abbott’s program is not an abstraction in this district. Its effects arrived here.

The Pledge She Made, and the Question She Hasn’t Answered

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Her six-figure TV ad campaign, launched in mid-May, includes a spot titled “Never Backs Down” — a declaration that the Rockland County legislator and frontrunner in New York’s competitive 17th Congressional District Democratic primary doesn’t flinch when it comes to ICE. Patch

Her personal financial disclosure tells a different story.

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$395,000 in the Companies Arming ICE

Davidson introduced the “Safety and Dignity for All Act,” a bill that would limit how sheriff’s deputies and other county employees work alongside ICE. What she doesn’t mention in her ads: she holds stock in three companies that have made the agency’s enforcement operations possible. CBS News

As of May 2026, Davidson and her family reported owning up to $395,000 in Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle — three corporations with active ICE contracts. She also collected up to $12,300 in dividend income from those holdings since the start of 2025.

Microsoft’s ICE relationship alone is substantial. The Guardian reported earlier this year that ICE deepened its reliance on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as it ramped up arrest and deportation operations — more than tripling the amount of data it stored there. Amazon’s relationship with the agency is just as lucrative: Forbes reported that ICE spent a record $25 million with Amazon over just an eight-month period in the first year of the second Trump administration. Oracle, meanwhile, has landed ICE cloud infrastructure contracts through federal procurement channels.

Davidson is not just a passive shareholder. She is a candidate running immigration enforcement oversight as a central promise — while collecting dividend checks from the companies making that enforcement possible.

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But the vote was only half the battle. The bill now moves to the House, where a GOP conference that has spent months fighting itself over the shape, size, and contents of this legislation is waiting.

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Ally Henny, a chaplain at a Chicago hospital and a religious leader on the city’s southeast side, told Migrant Insider she was preparing to leave for work around 6:40 a.m. when she heard a man’s voice cut through the morning quiet.

“Ayuda.”

She knew enough Spanish to know what it meant.

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It was his first appearance before Congress since his confirmation in March. It will not be his last uncomfortable afternoon under the lights — the House Homeland Security Committee picks up where the Senate left off Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. in 310 Cannon.

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Three separate rulemaking actions, all traceable to HR-1 or the administration’s broader anti-immigration executive agenda, are now winding through the regulatory process. Together, they signal something bigger than any single policy change: a deliberate effort to make immigration consequences permanent, expensive, and nearly impossible to escape — even for people who are already gone.

The $18,000 Penalty for Missing Court

Start with the largest number: $18,000.

That is the mandatory civil fee the Department of Homeland Security has proposed for any noncitizen who was ordered removed in absentia — meaning they missed a court date — and is later arrested by ICE. The current fee is $5,130. Under the proposed rule, citing new statutory authority created by HR-1, the fee would more than triple overnight.

The rule is non-waivable. The only escape is if the in absentia order itself is vacated — and the grounds for that are narrow: lack of proper notice, or exceptional circumstances. If neither applies, the $18,000 is owed, on top of detention and deportation.

To understand the scale of who could be affected, look at EOIR’s own numbers embedded in the rule: in absentia removal orders jumped from 62,510 in 2022 to 222,920 in 2024 — a 257% increase — and then to 309,700 in 2025. That last figure is not a historical curiosity. It is the pool of people this fee is designed to reach the moment ICE finds them.

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Jean Wilson Brutus was Haitian. He arrived at Delaney Hall and was dead within 24 hours. ICE waited a week to say anything publicly.

A pregnant woman currently inside the facility is in excruciating pain. She has no access to an OB-GYN.

Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., has been documenting conditions like these since last May. She spoke to Migrant Insider this week as a coordinated hunger and labor strike by roughly 300 detainees enters its second week — and as the Trump administration pursues felony charges against her for showing up.

“The facility is unfit to be open,” McIver said, “and …

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So when Símon Rios of WBUR asked me to join the New York Times and Boston Herald on a panel about mass deportations, I said yes. For the last five years, I’ve avoided this type of opportunity, choosing instead to focus on “the work”, as it were.

But sometimes focusing on the work means I’m getting out in the world beyond the Beltway bubble and meeting colleagues face to face who I’ve communicated with for years in DMs and group chats. Truth be told, I’ve become a bit of a hermit since I started Migrant Insider. My entire life since Trump returned to power has been lived in the two…

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WASHINGTON — She ran the ad. She made the claim. Now the record speaks.

Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., the frontrunner in Maryland’s crowded Democratic House primary, is telling voters she “voted 100% against Trump’s ICE.” It is not true. Not close to true. And the receipts are sitting in the Congressional Record.

McClain Delaney has voted with Donald Trump roughly 22% of the time — nearly twice as often as any other Maryland Democrat — casting a string of pro-ICE votes that expanded the agency’s detention powers, handed it nearly $1 billion in fresh funding, and even thanked it publicly for carrying out the most aggressive mass deportation campaign in modern American history.

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The donation, first reported by Nick Schwellenbach of the Project on Government Oversight, was routed through a so-called “dark money” vehicle — a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that, by design, keeps its donors secret and faces no legal cap on contributions.

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Eleven Days

GEO’s $250,000 landed on July 15, 2025 — eleven days after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a law that nearly triples ICE’s budget and doubles immigrant detention capacity nationwide. GEO lobbied on the bill before it passed. Jordan was among its loudest champions, calling it the vehicle for “Big, Beautiful Deportations.”

The recipient, American Liberty Action Fund, shares its president, secretary, and treasurer with a Jordan-aligned…

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That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. Somewhere between the first wave of Schedule F firings and the gutting of USAID, somewhere between the dismantling of the Department of Education and the methodical hollowing of the career civil service, the damage stopped being a scandal and became a condition. And nobody — not the press corps, not the think tanks, not the Democratic opposition, not the inspectors general who were fired before they could finish their reports — nobody was keeping a comprehensive, systematic record of exactly what was broken, what was shredded, and what was simply abandoned.

Which means the first post-MAGA White House will walk into a building and not know what’s missing.

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