The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a pair of clean immigration wins last week, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded by announcing he would ignore them. Now Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) is sounding the alarm.
The Court ruled 6-3 Thursday in Mullin v. Doe to allow the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants. This ruling set off predictable outrage from the progressive wing of the party. Mamdani was first out of the gate. In a video statement, he declared the decision "cruel" and invoked the specter of the Haitian Revolution to frame deportation enforcement as a betrayal of universal freedom.
"To have people who frankly taught the world about freedom have their own freedom put into jeopardy by the actions of a Supreme Court and federal administration - it is not only cruel, it's not something we will ever accept," Mamdani said. "The Supreme Court just sparked one of the largest attacks on immigrants in modern American history. In one fell swoop, thousands of Haitians and Syrians now risk losing the right to live and work in the country they call home."
He went on to reassure migrants that New York City would not comply with the ruling.
"To the tens of thousands of New Yorkers with TPS who are watching the news, frightened about what comes next, hear me clearly: New York City is your home. You belong here. We will not turn our backs on you," Mamdani said. "You will not face this cruelty alone. This administration will stand alongside immigrant New Yorkers today, tomorrow, and every day that follows."
These are not ambiguous rulings with room for creative local interpretation. The Supreme Court made its ruling, and Mamdani's position is that he can ignore it just because he doesn't like it.
On Fox News's Saturday in America on June 28, Sen. Fetterman sat down with host Kayleigh McEnany and walked through a glaring inconsistency, one his own party seems unwilling to acknowledge. He has spent years pushing back on Democrats who insisted Donald Trump was dragging the country toward a constitutional crisis. His response at the time was straightforward: the Trump administration had not defied a court order. The standard, as Fetterman understood it, was simple. You follow the courts, or you create a crisis.
Now the mayor of New York City is publicly refusing to follow the courts' rulings, and the party that ran years of constitutional-crisis programming has gone quiet.
"I haven't seen the freak-out now that the mayor of New York is now saying I'm going to defy the Supreme Court ruling," Fetterman told McEnany.
He then called out his fellow Democrats, who are either silent or actively defending Mamdani.
"Many of the members in my party are not calling him out... [or they are] defend[ing] him, or just say[ing] we really actually have to follow the court rulings because... that's a constitutional crisis, when you have the leader of the country's largest city [saying] we're not going to follow or honor what the Supreme Court says," Fetterman said.
Fetterman has become a consistent, if lonely, Democratic voice against his party's leftward slide. He has cited progressive figures like Maine Senate candidate Graham Planter, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, Washington, D.C., mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George, and a wave of progressive candidates running across New York City as evidence that the party has lost touch with most Americans.