The Supreme Court has said that the Trump administration can go ahead with its plans to deport 500,000 “migrants” from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, ruling that the administration can cancel, as a preparatory step, the Temporary Protected Status the Biden administration had granted those illegal aliens. It’s only a partial victory, though, as the Court merely stayed a lower court ruling that barred the TPS cancelation while the matter works through the courts on its merits.

Two activist Justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, centered her dissent on the premise of the

devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.

I’ll omit comment on the cynicism of the “noncitizen” characterization. Whether cancelation and potential subsequent deportation are good or bad policy, whether the removal is disruptive of the lives of those 500,000, these are political and social considerations, and so they are wholly irrelevant here. What does matter, all that is relevant, is whether the Trump administration is acting within the law. That is all that an American court can adjudicate; political and social considerations are the province of the political branches of our government and are explicitly outside the scope of our judicial branch. The judicial branch has no jurisdiction whatsoever on purely political/social matters.

All that matters to the judges, all that should matter, is what the stature before them and the relevant clauses of our Constitution say, not what judges think they should say.