The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in favor of a Wisconsin-based Catholic charity group in a case involving unemployment tax credits for religious institutions, handing faith-based organizations a victory after they argued the state’s decision violated the religious clauses of the First Amendment.
The high court’s justices unanimously agreed that the state had engaged in an “unnecessary entanglement” in seeking to determine whether religious groups could be eligible for an otherwise accessible tax exemption based on the state’s religious conduct requirements, Fox News noted.
“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, writing for the majority.
“Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion,” Sotomayor added.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court had previously ruled that the Catholic Charities group in question was not “operated primarily for religious purposes,” since it serve and employs non-Catholics, and does not “attempt to imbue program participants with the Catholic faith.”
The nation’s highest court made headlines recently by giving the Trump administration a big win.
The Supreme Court on Friday allowed Trump’s administration to remove the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, supporting the Republican president’s push to increase deportations.
The court stayed Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s order halting the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 of these migrants by former President Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to immediate removal, while the case is heard in lower courts.
The ruling was unsigned and did not justify, as is common with emergency court orders. Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, officially dissented, CNN noted.
Immigration parole is a type of temporary authorization granted by American law to enter the nation for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” which allows grantees to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s strategy for deterring illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20, his first day back in office, calling for the elimination of humanitarian parole programs. The Department of Homeland Security then attempted to terminate them in March, shortening the two-year parole awards. The government said that revoking parole would make it simpler to place migrants in an “expedited removal” procedure.
The lawsuit is one of many that the Trump administration has filed urgently with the nation’s highest court, seeking to overturn judgments by lower courts that hinder his sweeping plans, including those targeting immigration.
On May 19, the Supreme Court also allowed Trump to withdraw a deportation protection known as temporary protected status, which Biden had granted to some 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States while the legal battle was being resolved.
To minimize illegal border crossings, Biden announced in 2022 that Venezuelans who entered the United States by air might receive a two-year parole provided they passed security screenings and had a U.S. financial sponsor.
Biden expanded the procedure to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans in 2023, as his government dealt with large numbers of illegal immigration from those countries.
The plaintiffs, a group of paroled migrants and Americans who serve as their sponsors, sued administration officials, alleging that they violated federal law controlling government agency acts.
In April, Talwani determined that the statute regulating such parole did not allow for the program’s blanket termination but rather required a case-by-case examination.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay the judge’s judgment.
In its filing, the Justice Department informed the Supreme Court that Talwani’s order had overturned “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry,” effectively “undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election” that returned Trump to the presidency.
