Administrative Remedies

Fritz Miot has lived in California for fifteen years under Temporary Protected Status, working in an Alzheimer's research lab while managing a diabetes diagnosis that Haiti's collapsed healthcare system can't treat. On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court told him a federal court isn't allowed to ask whether the government even followed its own rules before ending his status — not whether he loses on the merits, but whether anyone can look at all.
In the second half of our emergency two-part season opener, Gwen and Marc dig into Mullin v. Doe: how "no judicial review of any determination" swallowed a mandatory consultation requirement, why the State Department told DHS one thing and the public another, and what Justice Thomas's solo concurrence is quietly setting up for a future case. Slaughter closed the check inside the agency. Mullin closes the one outside it.

For ninety years, Congress could build federal agencies designed to operate at arm's length from the president. Bipartisan commissions, staggered terms, for-cause removal — a whole architecture of institutional independence protected by Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935). On June 29, 2026, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court overruled Humphrey's by name and said it had been wrong the day it was decided. Rebecca Slaughter, the FTC commissioner Donald Trump fired in March 2025 for reasons that had nothing to do with her job performance, loses her case. So does the general category of "independent agency" as a distinct constitutional structure.
In this episode, we walk through what Trump v. Slaughter actually held, why the Court's reasoning goes wider than its holding, and what happens next. We cover the "Decision of 1789" the majority uses as its historical anchor and Justice Sotomayor's response. We examine the stare decisis fight — seven prior Supreme Court cases had blessed the Humphrey's structure by name, including recent decisions the Court had just handed down. We explain the companion case, Trump v. Cook, decided the same morning, which saved the Federal Reserve on historical grounds while everyone else lost the same protection. And we get into the part the majority didn't quite say out loud: the opinion carefully carves out the Fed and Article I courts, but not administrative law judges. What that silence means for the MSPB, for ALJ tenure protection, and for every federal adjudication system in the country is the question the next Supreme Court term will start to answer.
Justice Gorsuch's concurrence lays out what he calls the "ratchet effect" — Congress delegated enormous power to agencies on the premise that those agencies would be independent, and that premise is now gone. What Congress thought it bargained for is not what Congress got. Justice Barrett's dissent in Cook asks how history can support both a categorical rule ending independence everywhere and a carveout preserving it at one institution. The Court, she notes, does not say.
Read the full explainer at remediespodcast.com/learn-trump-v-slaughter-explained.

A visitation room in a private detention facility in rural Louisiana. Cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, two plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Elena is on one side. A lawyer who drove three hours from New Orleans is on the other. They have ninety minutes. Elena has eight months until the hearing that decides whether she gets asylum or gets sent back to Honduras. The evidence she needs to prove her case is in a town she can't safely call into, held by family members who might be at risk just from gathering it.
In the second part of their immigration deep dive — and the final episode of Season 2 — Gwen and Marc move from the machinery to the person standing inside it:
Why representation matters more in immigration than anywhere else in the federal system — represented asylum seekers win at several times the rate of unrepresented ones, and unrepresented detained respondents face denial rates around ninety percent
The Sixth Amendment gap: immigration removal is classified as civil, not criminal, so there's no right to appointed counsel. If you can't find a lawyer and the pro bono organizations are full, you represent yourself against a trained government attorney through an interpreter
How detention structurally degrades the case before the hearing happens — bond decided in a ten-minute video proceeding, evidence that can't be gathered from inside a facility, and the same docket clock running whether you're preparing from a lawyer's office or a monitored phone booth
The constitutional floor that most people assume exists and doesn't: plenary power from the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case, Thuraissigiam's holding that someone apprehended twenty-five yards inside the border has essentially no due process right to judicial review, and a 2025 executive order testing whether that logic extends to anyone anywhere in the country who can't prove two years of presence
Why you don't have to disagree with the doctrine to be troubled by the outcomes — strict or generous, the law is supposed to apply the same way to the same facts, and the data says it doesn't
Next season: judicial review. What happens when this finally gets to court — and why it's not the rescue mechanism people imagine.

Two asylum seekers cross the southern border six months apart. Same country, same persecution, same statute. A clerk neither of them has ever met routes one to the regular docket and the other to an expedited docket. One gets heard in eight months. The other is waiting until 2028. That single routing decision is now six years of difference.
In the first of a two-part deep dive on immigration adjudication, Gwen and Marc walk through the system that will decide both of their cases:
3.2 million pending cases, 2.3 million of them asylum, divided among roughly 700 immigration judges — about 3,200 cases per judge, each requiring hours of fact-intensive testimony through interpreters about events in another country
The particular social group doctrine — the single most contested category in asylum law, which has flipped four times in eleven years through Attorney General certification. Same statute, same words, opposite results depending on who holds the office when your case is heard
How the AG cleared 767,000 cases in 2025 — the highest single-year total in the system's history — through a mix of procedural exits, compressed dockets, and doctrinal changes that foreclosed categories of claims that were viable when applicants filed
The MSPB decision that stripped immigration judges of civil service protections, holding they're inferior officers removable at will — meaning the judge deciding whether to grant asylum on a borderline theory now knows she can be fired tomorrow with no notice and no appeal
The denial rate climbing from roughly fifty percent in 2023 to eighty percent in February 2026, without a single statutory change
Rosa's hearing is in 2028. She'll argue a social group theory the Attorney General has already foreclosed, with six-year-old evidence about a country she fled six years ago, in front of a judge who can be removed at will. The statute hasn't changed. Everything else has.
Next episode: the person standing inside the machinery — detention, representation, expedited removal, and why the Constitution doesn't fix any of it.

Until June 2024, the Social Security Administration was denying disability claims on the grounds that applicants could work as pneumatic tube operators — a job that functionally disappeared decades ago. The agency's catalog of occupations hadn't been updated since 1991. Congress noticed. Courts complained. The agency issued two emergency messages. The fix removed 114 jobs nobody was citing anyway and added a documentation requirement to 13 jobs people were. The vocational expert who cited pneumatic tube operator last year can cite it again next year, as long as they say an extra sentence.
That catalog isn't the problem. It's the symptom. In this episode, Gwen and Marc walk through what Social Security disability adjudication actually looks like when you run it two and a half million times a year:
The five-step sequential evaluation that decides every claim — substantial gainful activity, severity, the listings, past work, and the step five question that wins or loses most cases: is there any other job in the national economy you could do?
The grids — literal rows and columns where you plug in age, education, work history, and RFC, and the table tells you whether you're disabled. The Supreme Court blessed this trade in Heckler v. Campbell: uniformity over individualized judgment, explicitly because the alternative would "hinder needlessly an already overburdened agency"
The age cliff: at fifty-four, the grids say not disabled. At fifty-five, same medical condition, same RFC, same education, same work history — disabled. The borderline rule that's supposed to soften this treats five months as too far away
How every structural feature from the trilogy — the forty-six point judge-level variation, the weak internal review, the ex ante control mechanisms — runs through the credibility finding and the RFC, which determine where you land on the grids
The Matthews problem at scale: the test counts administrative burden as a factor, and at two and a half million applications a year, that factor dominates the math. There's no doctrinal floor on how thin process can get once the system is big enough
People die waiting for hearings. The GAO and Social Security's own inspector general have documented it. At a nine-month average wait — an improvement from the fifteen months it was running in 2023 — that number is meaningful every year. That's not the system failing. That's the system working as designed, at volume.