For months now, President Donald Trump has been in a worsening conflict with the federal courts. While the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on some cases — handing the Trump administration victories in some cases and defeats in others — Chief Justice John Roberts is now making rare public remarks on what he perceives the judiciary’s purpose to be, as the president seeks the Supreme Court’s help in curbing the onslaught of nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders (TROs) hampering the administration.

Speaking at the Western District of New York’s 125th anniversary celebration Wednesday night, Roberts intoned, “In our Constitution, judges and the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government separate from the others, with the authority to interpret the Constitution as law and strike down acts of Congress or acts of the president.” He continued, “That innovation doesn’t work if the judiciary is not independent. Its job is to — obviously, decide cases — but, in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or of the executive, and that does require a degree of independence.”

Federal judges have been heavily restricting the president’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, particularly targeting his immigration policy. Nationwide injunctions and TROs have barred the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport illegal immigrants affiliated with the foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua (TdA), keeping taxpayer dollars from going to attorneys who defend illegal immigrants in court for free or from “sanctuary” cities sheltering illegal immigrants from federal authorities, and ending parole programs used by the previous administration to usher hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the U.S.

The Supreme Court has intervened in several of the cases besieging the Trump administration but has delivered mixed results. Most recently, the nation’s highest court stayed a lower court’s order, allowing the Trump administration to start removing individuals who identify as transgender from the military. But in another major case, the Supreme Court vacated an order from Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — the order which had barred the Trump administration from using the AEA to deport TdA members and affiliates — only to impose new restrictions on the president’s use of the AEA in a move Justice Samuel Alito described as “unprecedented and legally questionable,” potentially overstepping the court’s jurisdiction and violating its own rules.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to intervene once again in yet another immigration-related case. Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts previously barred Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem from terminating parole status for an estimated 530,000 Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan nationals, most of whom entered the country illegally. Talwani argued in her injunction order that the DHS secretary only has the authority to revoke parole status on a “case-by-case” basis and cannot simply end hundreds of thousands of parole grants at a time, despite the suggestion that the Biden administration granted parole indiscriminately to hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit refused to stay Talwani’s order, although the court did observe that the statute establishing the DHS secretary’s parole-granting-and-revoking authorities may not be quite as clear as Talwani seemed to think.

This week, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to step in and halt Talwani’s sweeping injunction. “This application seeks to correct a recent, destabilizing trend in immigration cases,” the Trump administration attorney wrote. He argued, “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) … vests the Secretary of Homeland Security with broad discretion over categories of immigration determinations, and precludes judicial review of such discretionary determinations.” Sauer continued, “Specifically, the INA permits the Secretary to grant parole to aliens ‘on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,’ and it permits the Secretary to revoke that parole whenever ‘the purposes of such parole shall, in the opinion of the Secretary of Homeland Security, have been served.’”

“The previous Administration granted parole categorically to aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, resulting in the parole of 532,000 aliens into the United States,” Sauer explained. He recounted that Talwani’s injunction “engaged in the very review Congress prohibited — needlessly upending critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry, vitiating core Executive Branch prerogatives, and undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election.”

“That discretionary rescission of a discretionary benefit should have been the end of the matter: Congress reserved those decisions exclusively to the Secretary, who weighed foreign-policy objectives and other factors and rendered her decision,” the solicitor general wrote. He added, “Instead, the district court certified a class of all aliens in the United States who had received parole under the … parole programs, then indefinitely halted the Secretary’s March 2025 termination.”

“This Court’s immediate intervention is warranted. The district court has nullified one of the Administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions, revoking Secretary Noem’s decision and maintaining parole for up to two years for 532,000 aliens whose continued presence in the United States the Secretary deems contrary to U.S. interests,” Sauer petitioned the Supreme Court. He noted that allowing Talwani’s dismissal of the INA’s judicial review-barring clause would open the floodgates for federal judges everywhere to disregard explicit instructions from Congress exempting certain actions from judicial review. “Further, the district court’s reasoning that parole revocations must be made on a case-by-case, alien-by-alien basis contradicts the plain text of the statute and creates a perverse one-way ratchet,” he added, noting that the previous administration granted parole categorically — not on a case-by-case basis — and explicitly reserved the right to terminate that parole at will.

“The district court’s indefinite halt of parole revocation irreparably harms the government. The court’s order blocks the Executive Branch from exercising its discretionary authority over a key aspect of the Nation’s immigration and foreign policy and thwarts Congress’s express vesting of that decision in the Secretary, not courts,” Sauer declared, pointing out that years-long bars on ending temporary and discretionary legal status grants significantly impedes the executive branch’s ability to carry out mass deportation programs and even enforce existing immigration law. The immigrants who brought the complaint in the first place, he said, “cannot claim any cognizable irreparable harm; they accepted parole with full awareness that the benefit was temporary, discretionary, and revocable at any time.” Sauer concluded, “This Court should put an end to the recent, destabilizing trend in INA cases and stay the district court’s order in full.”