The Supreme Court just handed President Trump one of his biggest immigration victories yet.
New York City’s far-left mayor didn’t take it well.
Now Zohran Mamdani is threatening to use the full weight of city government to fight a ruling from the highest court in the land.
The Court Speaks, 6-3
In Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court held that the TPS statute bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims challenging the Trump administration’s termination of TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals, ruling 6-3 along ideological lines and clearing the way for the Department of Homeland Security to end protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, holding that the statutory provision barring “judicial review of any determination” related to a TPS designation was “clear” and “very broad.”
DHS General Counsel James Percival called the ruling “a win for the rule of law and common sense,” and a White House spokeswoman said TPS “was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status.”
Congress created TPS in 1990 to provide short-term humanitarian relief for aliens who cannot safely return to their home countries. But what started as a temporary program kept getting extended, year after year, administration after administration, until hundreds of thousands of people built their entire legal status in this country around a designation that was never supposed to be permanent. That’s not a feature of the program. That’s the problem with it.
The terminations were expected to take effect within weeks of the ruling, barring further action by the lower courts.
This ruling ends the amnesty loophole Barack Obama and Joe Biden employed to flood the country with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from Haiti and Syria.
Mamdani Steps In Front of the Ruling
While some Democrats decried the ruling, socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani went further, suggesting he would defy the order of the highest court in the land and use his mayoral powers to protect migrants who lose protections against deportation.
“New York City will do everything in our power to fight back,” Mamdani said. “This is a city where we look out for our neighbors, where we don’t let those who are afraid of what makes this city great try to divide us.”
Mamdani also said of Haitians: “And to have a people who have frankly taught the world about freedom have their own freedom be put in jeopardy by the actions of a Supreme Court and a federal administration, it is not only cruel, it’s something that we will not ever accept.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James called the ruling a “betrayal of who we are supposed to be as a nation,” and Mamdani announced the activation of a free municipal legal hotline to help affected illegal aliens.
It remains unclear what resources Mamdani plans to devote to protecting Haitians and Syrians in his city, although he did provide New Yorkers with direct hotlines to the mayor’s office. At a minimum, that suggests he plans to use taxpayer resources to challenge federal court rulings.
And there’s the real story. New York City taxpayers — people who pay some of the highest taxes in the country — are apparently on the hook to fund a legal crusade against a Supreme Court decision that nine justices just examined and six upheld. That’s not standing up for your city. That’s a stunt.
What Mamdani Actually Believes
A little over 84,000 foreign-born Haitians resided in New York City as of 2023, according to a 2026 report from the city. Mamdani wants every one of them to stay, regardless of what the law says, regardless of what the courts decide, and regardless of what American voters chose when they sent Donald Trump back to the White House.
This is the latest in a string of announcements suggesting the self-described democratic socialist believes he can single-handedly stand up to or override federal law and court rulings.
But defiance is easy when it costs someone else money. Mamdani doesn’t pay New York City’s legal bills. Taxpayers do. And the people who are going to feel the real weight of his grandstanding aren’t the migrants he’s championing — they’re the working New Yorkers who can barely afford to live in the city he’s running into the ground.
The Supreme Court’s majority made a straightforward legal point: Justice Alito pointed to what he called “a strong, race-neutral explanation” for ending the designation for Haitians — namely, “the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.”
That’s not discrimination. That’s a policy position, applied consistently across every country in the TPS program. The three liberal justices dissented, of course. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. But six justices looked at the same statute and reached the same conclusion: the law doesn’t give the courts authority to second-guess this call.
The Bigger Play Here
Mamdani’s response isn’t really about Haitian or Syrian immigrants. It’s about positioning. He ran as a democratic socialist and won in New York City, which tells you something about New York City. Now he’s using the mayoral platform to build a national profile as the guy who stood up to Trump and the Supreme Court.
But there’s a reason Democrats keep losing the immigration debate with the rest of the country. Most Americans don’t think a temporary humanitarian program should become a de facto amnesty pipeline. Most Americans think the Supreme Court’s ruling should be followed. And most Americans look at a mayor who vows to defy the nation’s highest court and wonder who, exactly, he thinks he’s working for.
It is the latest in a string of announcements suggesting Mamdani believes he can single-handedly stand up to or override federal law and court rulings. At some point, that stops being principled resistance and starts looking like a man who simply doesn’t accept that elections and courts have consequences — unless those consequences happen to go his way.
And the voters who sent Donald Trump back to Washington, DC in 2024 knew exactly what they were voting for. Secure borders. Enforcement of immigration law. An end to the revolving door of temporary programs that never actually ended. The Supreme Court just backed them up. Mamdani can hold as many press conferences as he wants. The law is the law.
Sources: Daily Caller; amNewYork; Townhall; Fox News; The Blaze; Wikipedia, Mullin v. Doe; SCOTUSblog; Law.Cornell.edu; Fisher Phillips LLP; Christian Science Monitor