By Rep. Seth Moulton, from Massachusetts, is responding to a major Supreme Court loss the way many Democrats now do: by calling for changes to the Court itself.
The Massachusetts Democrat urged his party to pursue Supreme Court “reform” Thursday after a 6-3 ruling cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian nationals.
The case also involved Syria, but the largest immediate impact falls on Haiti. Roughly 347,000 Haitian nationals were covered by the TPS designation the administration moved to terminate, while a related Syrian TPS challenge was consolidated with the Haitian case before the Supreme Court.
The ruling was not simply a broad debate over whether Haiti remains dangerous or whether TPS is good policy. The legal question was narrower: whether federal courts could keep the TPS terminations on hold indefinitely while lawsuits against the administration continued.
The Supreme Court said they could not. The justices held that the TPS statute sharply limits judicial review of the secretary of homeland security’s termination decisions and bars the challengers’ non-constitutional claims. In practical terms, that means lower-court orders temporarily protecting Haitian and Syrian TPS holders were wiped away, allowing the administration to move forward while any remaining legal fight continues on narrower grounds.
Moulton posted on Twitter shortly after the decision:
Donald Trump’s Supreme Court has ended legal protections for tens of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants.
Rather than protect the hard-working families that contribute to our communities, Trump’s justices are sending them back to the same places they fled.
Democrats need… https://t.co/VYsbhiZcJi
— Rep. Seth Moulton Press Office (@RepMoulton) June 25, 2026
That last line is doing a lot of work.
“Court reform” has become the preferred Democratic phrase for structural changes to the Supreme Court, including proposals to expand the number of justices in an effort to overthrow rulings that have ranged from the word “temporary” to mean temporary to insisting that laws about abortion need to be passed by elected legislatures. Critics have pointed out that there’s no legal argument from the left, just power.
And this is not coming out of nowhere.
Democrats have spent years describing the Supreme Court as a broken institution whenever it refuses to deliver progressive policy wins. Former Attorney General Eric Holder pushed that fight back into the spotlight last year when he said court expansion should be on the table if Democrats return to power.
“Expanding the court is something I think that should be considered,” Holder said.
That was not a throwaway line. It was part of a broader Democratic argument that the current Supreme Court is illegitimate because conservatives hold a majority. The same argument has appeared in fights over abortion, gun rights, agency power, voting rules, redistricting, presidential authority, and now immigration.
Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers warned that Democrats were moving court expansion out of the activist fringe and into the party’s governing conversation. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said “everything is on the table” if Democrats regain control of Congress, while Rep. Jamie Raskin has backed expanding the Court from nine to 13 justices.
Republicans have called that a power grab, not reform.
“Democrat proposals to pack the Supreme Court or impose term limits would be a naked abuse of power, a violation of an independent judiciary, and a far greater threat to constitutional government than any so-called ‘norms’ breaking they’ve whined about for the past decade,” Sen. Mike Lee said earlier this month.
Sen. John Cornyn put it more bluntly.
“Our Democrat colleagues don’t want to keep losing cases in the courtroom, so they’ve adopted a new strategy: If you can’t win the game, change the rules, from packing the court with liberal justices to dictating recusal requirements,” Cornyn said. “Republicans will continue to fight to protect the integrity of America’s judicial system, and we will not allow Democrats to hijack the federal judiciary for their own partisan benefit.”
That broader fight over the courts has only intensified as liberal federal judges in the lower courts continue to shape Trump’s second-term agenda by asserting that they are the ones in charge, not elected officials.
Just this week, a Biden-appointed judge blocked the Trump administration from allowing states to use a centralized federal citizenship database to help verify voter eligibility. The administration had sought to let states use the SAVE system, which combines immigration and Social Security data, to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. Voting groups sued, and the judge sided with them, ruling that the effort threatened privacy rights and risked wrongly flagging eligible voters.
For Democrats, the decision reveals just how radical the party has moved in the past few years. For Republicans, it is another warning that the left’s definition of democracy often seems to mean one thing: Democrats win, or the rules must be rewritten.
The immigration fight is not just at the border anymore. It is in the courts, over the courts, and now inside the Democratic push to remake the judiciary, and the country, when the Constitution gets in the way.
[Read More: Democrats Plan To Promote A ‘Constitutional Crisis’]
