The Supreme Court issued two major opinions on immigration policy yesterday, both written by Justice Samuel Alito, and both delivering big wins to President Donald Trump. We’re still reaping the benefits of Trump defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, although these two wins will likely merely soften the blow of an expected loss for Trump in the birthright citizenship case.

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the justices ruled 6-3 that the definition of “in” means “in.”

That’s a tongue-in-cheek way of saying the issue at hand is where asylum seekers are located when they apply. Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy says they cannot come in until they’ve been approved, and his administration has worked to keep migrants away from the border in the first place. Specifically, the Immigration and Nationality Act stipulates that asylum is available to someone who “arrives in the United States,” and if a migrant is in Mexico trying to cross the border, he is not, in fact, in the United States.

“This case presents a straightforward question: whether an alien who seeks to enter the United States from Mexico ‘arrives in the United States’ when he or she is still in Mexico,” Alito wrote. “In the decision below, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit answered ‘yes.’ That is wrong. In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a city, or a country — before the person enters that place.”

Left-wing activists have been redefining English words to advance their agenda for decades now, but making “outside” mean “in” was a bridge too far. Well, except for the three left-wing activists who have seats on the Supreme Court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so certain that “in” can mean “outside” that she took the unusual step of reading her dissent from the bench. She huffed, “The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’ Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole.”

Instead, Sotomayor’s dissent was loaded with misdirecting words like “doorstep” and “threshold,” which do not appear in the statute at hand. It also compared the story of today’s migrants at the southern border to Jewish refugees turned away in 1939, after which 250 of them were killed by the Nazis.

As you can imagine, yet another tiresome Nazi analogy didn’t sit well with Alito, who took the even more unusual step of delivering a veiled rebuke after Sotomayor finished reading. He observed, “There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read.”

Regarding the Trump administration’s policy, National Review’s Dan McLaughlin explains why it’s necessary:

The case involves the long-running Trump effort to stem the flow of pretextual asylum claims. The standard for asylum is a demanding one, but progressives have taken a flood-the-system approach: Get people into the country, file requests for asylum, insist that the claimants get to stay in the country while their cases are being heard, profit from the backlog this creates to allow people years to set down roots here and have citizen children, and only then maybe show up for the hearing instead of just vanishing into the country, after which an appeal can be filed to drag things out. The fraudulence of this strategy becomes apparent once one considers that courts reject upwards of 98 percent of all contested asylum claims. Any federal appeals judge or clerk can tell you how mind-numbing it is to plow through vast piles of meritless appeals.

Trump has ended the lawless approach of his predecessor and opponents, which is why illegal border crossings have been effectively zero for the last year. The U.S. does not, in fact, have to let everyone in before deciding if they can stay.

In Mullin v. Doe, Alito wrote for the majority, again 6-3, that the Trump administration can set policy saying that “no” means “no,” and as Border Czar Tom Homan put it, “Temporary means temporary.”

Alito wrote, “In these cases, we consider whether respondents, who challenge the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for aliens from Syria and Haiti, are entitled to orders postponing the terminations during litigation. We hold that they are not.”

Again, McLaughlin explains the law: “The TPS statute, enacted in 1990, allows the president to designate particular countries as unsafe because of war, natural disasters, epidemics, or other temporary crises and therefore give their nationals temporary protection to stay within this country.” Syria has had TPS since 2012, and Haiti since 2010. “Temporary,” indeed.

Moreover, the law specifically stipulates that there “is no judicial review of any determination … with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” Lower courts have totally ignored that because district judges are so intent on blocking every move Trump makes.

Trump revoked TPS for migrants from Syria and Haiti, the latter of which were at the center of that phony whipping controversy a few years back. The rationale is that the same level of crisis no longer exists in either country, but again, leftists generally do redefine “temporary” to mean “permanent.”

Interestingly, part of the dispute among the justices was over whether foreign nationals have a constitutional argument for equal protection. As Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his concurring opinion, “Aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.”

The left-wing dissenters said they do have equal protection rights, with Justice Elena Kagan further arguing that the Trump administration displayed “racial animus” against the Haitians. This simplistic Marxism reduces everything to a false binary. By this logic, if something undesirable (to the Left) happens to a person of color, the reason is racism. By contrast, if unmerited favoritism happens to a person of color at the expense of a person of pallor, that is somehow not racism.

Yet the very fact that the Trump administration has removed TPS for more than a dozen countries belies the phony race claim.

Never mind all that, Democrats say. They’re not happy with these rulings, so, predictably, they reiterated calls for packing the court with leftists who will rule the way they want.

To zoom back out, both of yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings set the stage for President Trump and his administration to continue preventing the entry of illegal border crossers and deporting more aliens. Also, as I noted at the outset, the rulings will blunt the expected loss in the birthright citizenship case. That’s not just because Trump got two wins compared to one loss, but because his administration can reduce the number of babies born to illegal aliens via the TPS and asylum policy changes.

It’s obvious to me that birthright citizenship has been unconstitutionally abused, running afoul of the plain language of the 14th Amendment. Practically speaking, however, if illegal aliens are kept out of the country in the first place or removed after crossing the border, the problem is largely mitigated, even if the justices get it wrong.

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