March 18, 2026
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has stood with immigrants against treatment from her fellow justices siding with President Donald Trump who abruptly interrupted legal status of TPS immigrants, sometimes standing alone.
Known as one of her sharpest dissents, the Supreme Court stood behind Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by blocking the Trump administration from revoking Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian immigrants, Slate reports.
Without any dissents, the highest court in the land is allowing immigrants from those nations to continue living and working in the U.S. legally while it reviews the administration’s arguments that it has the power to strip protections overnight. So, without any emergency rulings, all nine justices will decide — including full briefings, oral arguments, deliberation, and an opinion — over inserting the shadow docket, with minimal explanation.
The first Black woman justice should feel vindicated after fighting for this cause for the last 10 months, supporting hundreds of thousands of law-abiding noncitizens who will stay protected from deportation temporarily. Brown Jackson has stood with immigrants against treatment from her fellow justices who have sided with President Donald Trump, who abruptly interrupted the legal status of TPS immigrants, sometimes standing alone. In one of her dissents, she condemned the conservative majority for its “grave misuse” of the shadow docket as a privilege toward the “bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our government has promised them.”
She then encouraged her colleagues to resolve this dispute through the ordinary process, all while maintaining the status quo for immigrants, rather than issuing another snap judgment to please the Trump administration.
It’s not just immigrants from Haiti and Syria that Brown Jackson is siding with, but all immigrants. After the Supreme Court gave the green light to the administration to remove legal protections from more than 300,000 immigrants from Venezuela, she sent a stern statement against the court’s “repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference.”
“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. This Court should have stayed its hand,” the justice wrote in October 2025, according to Newsweek.
“Having opted instead to join the fray, the Court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.”
She recently spoke out against shadow dockets in a rare dual appearance with conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The process allows policies to go into effect almost immediately, even if they’re in the early stages of legal challenges, saying it’s “not serving the court or this country well.” “I just feel like this uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved … is a real unfortunate problem,” Jackson said during a conversation moderated by U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman.
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