Democrats spent years packing lower courts with activist judges to block President Trump’s immigration agenda at every turn.
The Supreme Court just made that strategy look very small.
And now some of the loudest voices in the Democrat Party are threatening to blow up the entire judicial system because they can’t stand what happened next.
The Ruling That Set Democrats on Fire
In the case known as Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the TPS statute bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims challenging a TPS termination, reversing lower courts that had postponed the terminations for Haiti and Syria.
The decision cleared the way for the Department of Homeland Security to end protections for approximately 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, and, because it held that courts cannot review most TPS determinations, was reported to place at risk protections for others among the roughly 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 countries.
TPS was established by Congress in 1990 as a program that allows migrants whose home countries are considered unsafe to live and work in the United States for a temporary, but extendable, period of time. The word “temporary” is right there in the name. But somewhere along the way, “temporary” quietly became “permanent” for hundreds of thousands of people who were never supposed to stay indefinitely.
Trump sought to end TPS for hundreds of thousands of migrants as part of his efforts to restrict immigration during his first term, but his attempts were delayed by court challenges. His successor, Joe Biden, promised to overhaul Trump-era immigration policies, granting TPS status to several additional countries and extending deportation protections for others. Biden turned a temporary humanitarian tool into something closer to a backdoor amnesty pipeline, and the Supreme Court has now told the Democrats that the executive branch — not federal judges — gets to decide when conditions warrant TPS.
Moulton and Clarke Demand the Court Be Packed
Democratic Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA) responded to the decision by urging Democrats to “reform” the court.
And what does “reform” mean to a Democrat in 2026? Packing it with new justices until it rules the way they want.
“Rather than protect the hard-working families that contribute to our communities, Trump’s justices are sending them back to the same places they fled. Democrats need to reform the court to preserve our rights and protect TPS families,” Moulton wrote on X.
On CNN, Moulton argued that the Supreme Court is “basically saying that 350,000 people here should go back to a country that the State Department, under Marco Rubio, has said Americans can’t travel there because it’s so unsafe” and, in response, there should be talk about packing the court “to push back against the MAGA Republicans.”
New York Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) didn’t hold back either. “SCOTUS is more than eager to prove to this president that it has no interest in serving its constitutional role as a check on the Executive’s power, but instead only as an enabler of its worst abuses. Unfortunately, Congress has stood by and waited for this activist court to recalibrate its duty to the law and America’s well-being,” Clarke said in a statement.
Clarke, the chair of the House of Representatives’ Black Caucus, worked with the House’s Hispanic and Progressive Caucus chairs to create a resolution for “enacting structural changes to the Supreme Court,” according to Politico.
But this push didn’t start with the TPS ruling. The representatives drafted the resolution initially in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which held that Louisiana’s prior Voting Rights Act-compliant congressional map actually constituted unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. The TPS ruling just handed them a second grievance to pile on. Whether the cause is immigration or redistricting, the answer from these Democrats is always the same: change the court.
What This Is Really About
Let’s be direct. Adding seats to the Supreme Court so a Democrat President can fill them with hand-picked justices would turn the nation’s highest court into a rubber stamp for the left-wing agenda — permanently. Every ruling on immigration, elections, gun rights, religious liberty, and the power of the federal bureaucracy would be decided in advance before a single brief was filed.
Democrats can’t win these arguments on the merits. They couldn’t get Congress to pass a permanent amnesty. They couldn’t get the courts to rubber-stamp Biden’s TPS expansions forever. So now they want to change the rules of the game entirely. Calling it “structural reform” doesn’t change what it is: a scheme to import a permanent Democrat majority into the one branch of government voters can’t directly throw out of office.
In a separate case decided the same day, SCOTUS ruled 6-3 in Blanche v. Muk Choi Lau, which will make it easier for DHS officials to deport green card-holders who have been convicted of crimes in the United States. Democrats were furious about that one too — though defending criminal aliens is a harder sell even.
If Democrats can’t win at the Supreme Court, they plan to rig the Supreme Court through court packing to ensure they never lose again.