Supreme Court Limits Religious Liberty Protections While Expanding Border Authority

The Supreme Court issued rulings this week that appear to expand Trump administration authority while simultaneously narrowing Congress's ability to enforce a federal religious liberty statute, a contradiction neither side's coverage fully addresses. The two decisions involve the same case but turn on different constitutional mechanisms, and understanding what the Court actually held requires separating the framing from the holdings.

The documented facts: Damon Landor, a Louisiana inmate and practicing Rastafarian, sued the state prison for prohibiting him from maintaining uncut hair, a core religious practice he had observed for more than two decades. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), passed by Congress in 2000, prohibits prisons receiving federal funds from substantially burdening religious exercise without demonstrated justification. On the face of that statute's text, Landor's claim appears straightforward. The prison receives federal money. The state imposed a burden on his religious practice. The Court, however, ruled 6-3 that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority under the Spending Clause when it attached RLUIPA's protections to federal funding. Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion held that Congress cannot use spending conditions to regulate conduct the Constitution does not explicitly authorize it to regulate directly. The separate green card ruling, decided 6-3 in the Trump administration's favor, upheld an immigration statute granting border officials discretion to treat returning green card holders as applicants for admission if they are suspected of criminal activity.

The left framing, appearing in Vox and Mother Jones, emphasizes the irony: the Court has spent a decade expanding religious liberty protections for religious employers and organizations, yet refused to enforce religious liberty protections for incarcerated people. Mother Jones uses the phrase "stripping some victims of religious violations the ability to sue," and the headline emphasizes the blow to "Congressional Authority." This framing is accurate about the outcome but leaves out why the Court ruled as it did. The decision turns on the constitutional mechanics of the Spending Clause, not on hostility to religious liberty as such. The left coverage does not clearly explain that the Court was not ruling Landor's claim lacks merit; it was ruling Congress lacked the power to create this particular enforcement mechanism.

The right coverage, in The Daily Wire and The Federalist, frames the green card decision as a Trump victory and emphasizes border security. The Federalist headline uses the phrase "committed crimes" in quotation marks, a framing choice that underscores alleged crime rather than conviction. This coverage accurately describes the ruling but does not address the tension between the religious liberty standard the Court has previously endorsed and its refusal to enforce it in Landor's case.

What neither side foregrounds is the underlying constitutional question: the Court has dramatically expanded religious liberty protections when they benefit religious organizations and conservative religious practitioners, yet has narrowed Congress's power to enforce those same protections in institutional settings where vulnerable populations face the burden. The green card ruling grants executive branch officials broad discretion; the RLUIPA ruling strips federal enforcement power. Both 6-3 decisions reflect a consistent majority, suggesting the alignment is intentional rather than coincidental. The precedent this sets is that religious liberty protections now depend on which branch enforces them and which populations they protect.