The big headline today was that the United States Supreme Court granted a Trump administration request to stay a Massachusetts District Court order pending appeal. The order would have allowed half a million Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan citizens to remain in this country based on Biden’s say-so. The second headline was that Ketanji Brown Jackson, backed by Sonia Sotomayor, wrote an attack on her fellow justices, one rooted in emotionalism about the people affected by the order.

But—and I’m going to shock you—the two leftists have a point, which is that there is a tragic aspect to these illegal aliens’ situation. These people behaved rationally, given all the perverse incentives the Biden administration created. However, that’s neither Trump’s nor the other justices’ problem. This one is all on Joe Biden (or the AutoPen) and everyone else in the Biden orbit.

Let’s begin at the beginning. During the Biden administration, orders came from the Oval Office (no one knows who really authorized them) granting various protections to hundreds of thousands of people from countries mired in poverty and crime. It’s very important to note that none of these countries were experiencing a genocide, as that term was understood after WWII: Namely, a government deliberately targeting for extermination a cohort of people based upon race or creed. Instead, they were and are just lousy places to live.

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If you find yourself living in an anarchic, impoverished hellhole, and you’re a good person, you’ll try to flee to make a better life for yourself and your family. Likewise, if you’re a criminal, you’ll flee, too, whether to escape your own country’s legal system or to find easier pickings than an impoverished country can offer.

But the fact that some countries are hellholes does not give a United States president (or his AutoPen) the unilateral right to reverse America’s immigration laws. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what AutoPen Biden did. In 2022 and 2023, his administration created what came to be known as the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela (CHNV) Parole Program, giving minimally vetted residents of those four countries the complete and unfettered right to move to America for two years, including the right to work in this country. Eventually, over half a million people came in through this program, which has no legislative basis.

When the CHNV program—a purely executive action—was set to expire by its own terms in January 2025, President Trump exercised his executive prerogative and announced via two executive actions (here and here) that he was definitively terminating the program. The Department of Homeland Security then issued a notice putting Trump’s orders into effect, by “terminating the categorical parole programs for inadmissible aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and their immediate family members...that DHS announced in 2022 and 2023.”

Naturally, the Democrats found people to serve as names in a lawsuit filed against Kristi Noem. Also, naturally, they filed their suit in a friendly jurisdiction (Massachusetts), and a judge blocked Trump’s immigration initiative.

However, today, the Supreme Court issued a ruling stopping that judge’s order from going into effect while the matter is being appealed to the 11th Circuit. That means that the CHNV “refugees” are now here illegally, and can either depart voluntarily or wait until they’re deported.

The ruling is a single paragraph, but it’s accompanied by a bosom-heaving seven-page existential scream from Justice Jackson insisting that the “Court has plainly botched” its analysis of whether to grant a stay of Noem’s and Trump’s directives pending the appeal. The gist of the scream is that the people who arrived here will be irreparably harmed if their status is returned to that of being illegal aliens at the end of the appellate process. Thus, even if the Supreme Court is pretty sure the case is a loser, it’s still supposed to do whatever it can to ensure that the probable losing party—that is, the illegal aliens—doesn’t suffer during the process.

In fact, the case is a loser. What Biden did, Trump can undo, especially because Biden’s actions clearly contravened American law. Still, the dissent has a point: People will suffer.

All of these illegal aliens gave up their old lives, maybe spent money to come here (if they weren’t subsidized by George Soros-type organizations), and have started new lives in America. But that’s not a problem that should be blamed on Trump or a burden that should be placed on the American people, many of whom have already suffered tremendously, whether economically or in more deadly ways, from this influx of illegal aliens.

Instead, it’s just one more reminder of the terrible consequences that arise when an administration makes up the rules as it goes along to achieve political goals. The whole point of the rule of law is certainty, so that people can make rational choices that will best serve them.

Biden/AutoPen destroyed that certainty. The fact that ordinary people, whether Americans or illegal aliens, would be hurt by this despotic, arbitrary, and capricious approach was irrelevant. Democrats needed to change America’s racial, social, economic, and political make-up, and they willingly broke a lot of eggs (i.e., human lives) to make it happen.

And truly, the worst part of it is that the major actors in the Biden administration, from Mayorkas on down, will never be held accountable for the damage they caused and the lives they destroyed.