The Supreme Court wrapped up its 2025-26 term on June 30 by striking down President Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which sought to end the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to all people born on U.S. soil. While this was perhaps the most consequential, and certainly one of the most headline-grabbing, of the Court’s decisions this term, they also handed down several other decisions that will have far-reaching implications for working people.
Ending the Labor Board’s Independence
When Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, they envisioned the National Labor Relations Board as an independent agency that would carry out the Act’s explicit intent of “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing.” Encouraging collective bargaining and protecting workers’ rights was declared to be “the policy of the United States,” and this remains the law of the land.
While anti-labor presidents have appointed anti-labor members to the board, board members — including those appointed by previous presidents — have until now been protected from being fired for political reasons by a doctrine known as Humphrey's Executor, which stemmed from a 1933 Supreme Court case. In June, the Court explicitly overturned Humphrey's Executor in the case Trump v. Slaughter, ruling that presidents may, indeed, fire members of boards and commissions such as the NLRB and the Federal Trade Commission (of which Rebecca Slaughter was a member) simply because they do not like the board members’ decisions.
President Trump had not been waiting for Supreme Court sanction — he fired Gwynne Wilcox, the only Black woman to have ever served on the NLRB, in January 2025. But this ruling gives his administration a blank check to pressure the members of the NLRB and other boards that protect workers, consumers, and the environment. Beyond greater control of the governing boards, the administration is also seeking to remove the just cause protections that protect rank-and-file workers at the NLRB and other federal agencies from political interference in their work. This is what employers want, and in fact a UE employer has maintained a lawsuit challenging these protections.
Under Trump, the labor board has already taken a decidedly anti-worker turn, with dismissals of unfair labor practice charges brought by unions and workers soaring and the General Counsel indicating her intention to ask the board to reverse a number of pro-worker decisions made by the previous board under Biden. With the Court giving the administration even more influence over the board, we can expect that influence to be used to protect the President’s billionaire and corporate cronies at the expense of working people.
Protecting Capital
However, when it comes to independent boards which protect the interest of capital, the Court saw things differently. In Trump v. Cook, a decision issued on the same day as Trump v. Slaughter, the majority held that “our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference” justified maintaining just-cause protections for members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. The Federal Reserve sets interest rates; President Trump has been pressuring them to lower interest rates since he was returned to office, and his firing of Lisa Cook was widely seen as part of that pressure campaign.
The court also rebuked Trump by striking down his sweeping tariffs in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, decided in February. Like Trump v. Cook, this was a case that pitted Trump’s political priorities against the interests of the corporate elite as a whole, and in both cases the corporate elite won.
Democracy for Sale
In a decision handed down on the last day of the term, the Court struck down a campaign-finance law that limited the ability of political parties to coordinate with candidates. This ruling is a boon to all those who think there isn’t enough money in politics: it will allow wealthy donors to circumvent the existing contribution limits by routing their money through parties. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills. And the candidate can seek just such a donation.”
The ruling is also likely to strengthen parties’ control over their candidates. SCOTUSblog commentator Sarah Isgur pointed out on a liveblog when the decision was announced that “parties will have a lot more carrots and sticks to determine their own candidates” — making it more difficult for candidates who challenge party orthodoxy, like virtually all of UE’s closest allies in Congress, to run on the Democratic (or Republican) party line.
The campaign finance decision followed a decision earlier in the term when the Court, in a decision condemned by UE, gutted the one remaining section of the Voting Rights Act. As the UE officers said in April, “As a result of this decision, Black voters and other voters of color will be disenfranchised, and anti-labor politicians will find it even easier to gerrymander their way into permanent majorities.”
No Asylum
On June 25, the Court decided two cases which allowed the administration to physically block asylum seekers from entering the country, and to unilaterally revoke “Temporary Protected Status” from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who are currently in the U.S.
Both of these decisions revoke protections from people who are “playing by the rules.” Congress established the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, which allows people fleeing violence and natural disasters to live and work in the U.S. legally, and federal law permits noncitizens to apply for asylum when they “arrive[] in the United States.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, physically blocking asylum seekers from entering the U.S. to apply for asylum means that “[m]ore people will attempt to cross the border illegally.”
UE’s close ally National Nurses United condemned the decisions, stating, “This unconscionable ruling will leave thousands more immigrants – not just registered nurses and health care workers, but also teachers, airport workers, hard-working people – vulnerable to the Trump administration’s deadly, money-making deportation machine. These racist attacks on our communities are funded by trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that affect all Americans, no matter the color of their skin.”
The decision to deport 350,000 Haitians has also been condemned by Republican Congressman Carlos Giménez, who told CBS News, “Haiti is a failed state, and I think that deporting Haitians that are under TPS right now, back to Haiti, would be a huge mistake.” Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, has also called on the Trump administration to reconsider, noting that Haitian workers are important to his state’s manufacturing and healthcare industries. “It’s Haitians who, many times, are taking care of your mom or your dad who has Alzheimer’s, taking care of family members who might be in a nursing home,” he told CNN. “And to say we’re going to pull all those people out, it’s just not in our own self-interest.”
In the case of both Haiti and Syria, the U.S. government bears significant responsibility for the violence and chaos that the asylum-seekers are fleeing. The U.S. has intervened militarily in Haiti three times in the past century, and supported undemocratic, unpopular and corrupt leaders in the name of “anti-Communism,” including the brutal Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and the most recent Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, whose resignation in 2024 has left the country with essentially no functioning government for over two years. The violence and chaos in Syria also stems in part from repeated U.S. military interventions in the Middle East.
Some Persons Are More Equal Than Others
In two cases decided on the last day of the term, the Court issued a ruling allowing states to discriminate against trans athletes. Trans athletes in West Virginia and Idaho had brought suits arguing that those states’ bans on trans athletes playing girls’ and women’s sports violated their right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. The Court’s right-wing majority saw it otherwise, allowing the discriminatory laws to stand.
One of the central culture-war preoccupations of the Trump administration has been its efforts, as UE policy notes, to use “federal law against transgender people across the country in an effort to erase them from everyday life,” in an effort to “divide our class and weaken our movement.”
Most commentators on the Supreme Court decision agree that both the majority and dissenting opinions in this case were laying the groundwork for another set of cases, currently working their way through the court system, which seek to require all states to ban trans athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
Court Limits Searches of Personal Location Data, Preserves Birthright Citizenship
In two major cases this term, Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, joined with the Court’s three liberal justices and one or two Trump-appointed justices to preserve key Constitutional principles.
In Chatrie v. United States, the Court held that asking Google to turn over records of all cellphone users in a specific location at a particular time — what is known as a “geofence warrant,” is in fact a search, and that such warrants must be “reasonable” per the 4th Amendment. “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan for the majority.
The protection of civil liberties is of importance to the labor movement because, as UE Policy states:
UE has warned for years that when the government claims the power to surveil, detain, and deport people without due process, it can and will use that power against innocent people, particularly those who speak out against government policies, and especially those who represent a credible power base, such as the labor movement.
And as mentioned above, in its final decision of the term, Trump v. Barbara, the Court held that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship violated the plain and unambiguous language of the 14th Amendment (“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States”).
The decision was 6-3, but only five justices joined the majority opinion, written by Roberts. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, found that the executive order violated federal law, but not the Constitution. His opinion all but invited Congress to attempt to revoke this core Constitutional right through legislation. And indeed, President Trump is now pushing Congress to legislate exceptions to birthright citizenship.
For a Nation of Equals, Not Masters and Servants
In a blog post about the Court’s decisions this term, political theorist (and former union organizer) Corey Robin observed that the cases where the Court broke with Trump were “three of Trump’s biggest challenges to prevailing conservative and Republican orthodoxy ... Trump’s challenge to free trade and independent monetary policy—as well as the idea of the United States being a nation of the people who are born there, not a nation of blood but a nation of birth—simply proved a bridge too far for six of the nine justices, two of whom were appointed by Trump.”
However, even though the Roberts Court as a whole has been unwilling to move outside the bounds of Republican orthodoxy, the cases that Robin cites were not decided by a durable, consistent majority. In each case, Chief Justice Roberts cobbled together a majority with the three liberal justices and one or two defectors from the hard-right bloc.
Each of the five justices in that bloc (a majority of the court, if they are willing to unite and defy the Chief Justice) has shown him- or herself willing to jettison long-held Constitutional principles in order to further a vision of society that can fairly be called “fascist”: one in which a favored caste of people, defined by blood rather than birth, has more rights than everyone else. As Robin noted in a follow-up post on birthright citizenship, “No one believes overturning birthright citizenship will eliminate all immigrants; nativists are perfectly happy to have a lower caste of servile beings who do the shit work and get no rights.”
In her concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued for a different vision of our nation, one that should resonate with every trade unionist. “[T]he very thing for which the Fourteenth Amendment stands,” she wrote, is “a repudiation of the notion that there is a ‘superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,’ and a willingness to see, and strive to eliminate, all remaining vestiges of historical subjugation.
“Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people. And the Great Emancipator eventually foresaw that the only path forward that could prevent a return—in any form—to slavery and race-based subordination was to link the fates of all.”