# “Democracy and Asylum Rise and Fall Together” Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/on-the-nose-4035786/democracy-and-asylum-rise-and-fall-together Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/on-the-nose-4035786/democracy-and-asylum-rise-and-fall-together.md Podcast: [On the Nose](https://stenobird.com/podcast/on-the-nose-4035786) Published: 2026-07-02T13:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://jewishcurrents.org/democracy-and-asylum-rise-and-fall-together Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/0ca8db23-9f02-43ce-b0bf-77b7cd652d5d.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/on-the-nose-4035786/episodes/democracy-and-asylum-rise-and-fall-together Duration seconds: 2430 ## Resource Last week, the Supreme Court ruled on several issues related to immigration policy. While the court narrowly preserved birthright citizenship, it issued other rulings that will put an untold number of people in danger. One ruling, Mullin v Al Otro Lado , upheld the federal government’s policy of turning back asylum seekers before they can reach the US-Mexico border—a policy also known as “metering”—hollowing out the right to asylum enshrined in both domestic and international law. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor referenced the St. Louis , the ship of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany turned away from the US, whose passengers were mostly killed in the Holocaust: “Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past. Yet if the refugees on the M. S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto US soil,” she said. In another ruling, Mullin v Doe , the Supreme Court granted the president the power to end the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, which has allowed vetted and eligible immigrants to live and work legally in the US if they cannot return safely to their countries. Justice Samuel Alito, in his majority opinion, said courts do not have a say in what the president and the Department of Homeland Security decide; the president can end TPS for Haitians and Syrians without judicial review. He also rejected a separate claim brought by Haitians that the move to deport them was based in racial prejudice. TPS has been in effect since 1990. There are 350,000 Haitians who have been in the US legally under TP… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/on-the-nose-4035786/episodes/democracy-and-asylum-rise-and-fall-together/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/on-the-nose-4035786/democracy-and-asylum-rise-and-fall-together.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.