Earlier this week, the justices announced that they would take up what may be the most important case of the term. The Trump administration had asked the court to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha to review lower court rulings against its mandatory-detention policy for undocumented immigrants. How the Supreme Court decides the case could have vast implications for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out mass deportations.
To support this position, the administration cited a 1996 law known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Everyone calls it IIRIRA instead. Under IIRIRA, the Justice Department has claimed that one provision in the law requires federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants who illegally crossed the U.S. border. That provision says that “an alien who is an applicant for admission” into the United States “shall be detained” if “the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.”
Holding people indefinitely without due process has been illegal in the Anglo-American legal tradition since Magna Carta in 1215. More to the point, the administration’s policy appears to be based on a misreading of federal law. While the provision they cite does require mandatory detention in a narrow set of circumstances, it only applies to people who are an “applicant for admission”—meaning that they presented themselves at the U.S. border for entry.
In April, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him and rejected the administration’s interpretation of IIRIRA. The section it cited does not apply to undocumented immigrants “who were not apprehended while entering the country or shortly thereafter,” Judge Joseph Bianco wrote for the court. Instead, immigrants like Barbosa da Cunha fall under a different section of IIRIRA that does allow for bond hearings before an immigration judge.
The Supreme Court will also hear another major immigration case later this term on the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to third-country removals. Most deported immigrants have typically been returned to their home countries, aside from recent arrivals at the U.S. border in Mexico who are returned there. In their zeal to remove as many immigrants as possible from the United States, Trump administration officials have shipped thousands of them to countries in Africa that agree to take them in exchange for favorable diplomatic and financial treatment.
The first case of the term next week will also be one of the term’s most important decisions: Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. At issue is whether local communities that are harmed by climate change and its effects can seek damages in state courts from oil and gas companies that contributed to higher carbon emissions. The town of Boulder, Colorado, argued that its claims fit well within traditional causes of action for harms caused by companies.
In Viramontes v. Cook County, the justices will examine whether state assault-weapons bans can survive under the court’s new Second Amendment precedents. The plaintiffs in the case are challenging bans on AR-15s and similar rifles in both Illinois’s most populous county and the state of Connecticut. (The justices consolidated them on appeal.) Almost a dozen states have similar laws on the books. The Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment challenge to laws banning a specific type of firearm this century.
On the constitutional front, one of the most curious upcoming cases this term is Jouppi v. Arizona. The case centers on an Alaska pilot who flew into a dry town with a passenger who had a six pack of beer in their possession. In response, state officials charged the pilot with violating state liquor laws—which are aimed at reducing alcoholism and domestic violence in the state’s isolated interior—and seized his airplane, which is valued at more than $77,000.
The Supreme Court will also tackle what we can call the “known unknowns.” These are cases that the court is likely to hear but hasn’t yet intervened in. One area where the court may feel compelled to weigh in is on legal challenges to prediction markets and sports betting. A Supreme Court ruling in 2018 struck down a federal ban on sports betting, allowing dozens of states to pass laws to legalize and regulate sportsbooks within their borders. Last year, prediction-market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket also began allowing users to place wagers on the outcomes of professional and amateur sports at all levels in all 50 states, even those that have not legalized sports betting.
State regulators in Nevada and state attorneys general in California, New York, and other states sued Kalshi and Polymarket nonetheless for operating illegal sports-betting websites in their states. The states won a major victory over the summer when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prediction-market swaps on sports are bets and that federal law on derivatives exchanges hadn’t displace the states’ traditional authority to regulate gambling. At least one other circuit reached the opposite conclusion, making it likely that the justices will need to resolve the split in the coming term.
Since it is an election year, among the most important cases will be election-related ones. The court routinely hears a small number of cases involving ongoing elections on the shadow docket every two years, usually involving last-minute changes or new restrictions. Since last year, the justices have already considered a spate of cases involving the partisan-gerrymandering wars, which it largely let play out without further intervention. Some of those gerrymanders came about after the court effectively legalized racial gerrymandering last term.
This time, the concern is about what Trump could do after the election if he and Republicans suffer major defeats and lose control of Congress, as polls suggest they likely will. The Justice Department’s seizure of ballots in Georgia earlier this year stoked fears among voting rights groups that the administration will interfere in the certification of state results under the false guise of investigating voter fraud. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s legal bids to overturn the 2020 election six years ago. How they respond to any illegal and extralegal attempts to corrupt the 2026 midterms could be the most important test that the justices face this term.
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