The Supreme Court just told us Trump is going to lose this case: foremost expert

While admitting that trying to predict rulings from the Supreme Court can be foolish, a veteran court reporter for the New York Times nevertheless predicted that President Donald Trump is cruising for an inevitable defeat in one particular case.

Linda Greenhouse is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter known for covering the Supreme Court for the Times from 1978 to 2008. In a new piece published Thursday morning, she highlighted an ongoing case involving the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke Temporary Protected Status from Haitian and Syrian immigrants, Trump v. Miot and Mullin v. Doe. The case represents several that have been combined into one, with arguments set for April 29.

As Greenhouse explained, what has been surprising about this case was the Court’s decision not to pause the decisions of the lower court, allowing the immigrants to remain and continue working in the U.S. while the case progresses. In the recent past, the Court has often granted the Trump administration’s requests for stays, allowing their desired outcomes to continue while arguments are made and a new ruling is reached.

“The justices have failed to explain themselves in granting earlier stays and in denying this one,” Greenhouse wrote. “So we are left to guess at their reasoning and to wonder at the apparent unanimity of the latest order, which was issued without noted dissent.”

Numerous other legal scholars and experts have weighed in on what this discrepancy might mean, but in her Thursday piece, Greenhouse put forward a simple idea: even the Justices of the Supreme Court know that Trump is going to lose this time.

“The justices know the Trump administration is going to lose,” Greenhouse added. “With that knowledge, granting a stay to enable the deportation of some 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians, who would regain their protected status within months, became unthinkable. Decades of writing about the Supreme Court have taught me that it’s foolish to predict the outcome of cases, and I have rarely done so. My prediction here rests on one word: procedure.”

Greenhouse explained that the immigrants with Temporary Protected Status are required to be consulted by “appropriate agencies” prior to being stripped of that status, and a lower previously accused former DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, of a “brazen violation” of this rule. There was reportedly just a single email sent from DHS to the State Department about changing “T.P.S. status in Haiti,” while litigation was already ongoing.

“That was it,” lower court Judge Ana Reyes wrote. “Congress did not vest the secretary with Humpty Dumpty-like power to make the word ‘consultation’ mean ‘just what [she] chooses it to mean — neither more nor less.’”