CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic revealed the intense scene when Justice Samuel Alito fumed at Justice Sonia Sotomayor over a blistering dissent that “blindsided” him as several decisions involving President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda were read out.

The court announced a pair of 6-3 decisions on Thursday, one (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado) involving asylum-seekers arriving at the border and another (Mullin v. Doe) on the rescission of Temporary Protected Status.

On Thursday’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, Biskupic described the dramatic scene when Alito read out the former decision, and Sotomayor hit him with a surprise dissent that triggered Alito:

CNN ANCHOR DANA BASH: In the Supreme Court, in the chamber, when the justices put forward these two opinions, I can’t imagine how it felt in there, because we’ve seen the divide over and over again, but this was really explicit.

CNN CHIEF SUPREME COURT ANALYST JOAN BISKUPIC: It really was, Dana, and it boiled over in this one encounter between Justice Alito and Justice Sotomayor, who was dissenting from both of these immigration cases, and actually all three of the cases that Samuel Alito read today from the bench.

And after he finished the Mexican one, the one about the border and the definition of has somebody arrived or not arrived and you know that involves border agents going out and actually blocking asylum seekers from getting in.

There’s all sorts of good reasons for why administrations, and not just the Trump administration, the administration before it and the Biden administration for a while, wants to limit who’s coming, but the method is one that’s very controversial.

And after he finished explaining why that was perfectly legitimate for the administration to do, to block these asylum seekers, Justice Sotomayor said, “I have a dissent here.”.

Now, Justice Alito paused. So he must have known that something was coming from her. But I’ll pick up on how he responded after she spoke.

She begins, Dana, by talking about the moral imperative of allowing asylum seekers who are fleeing serious persecution from coming to America, allowing them to come to America. And she recalls… Incidents from the Nazi Germany era, specifically one episode when 900 Jews were on a ship trying to get to, first Cuba and then to the U.S.

And they were turned back in 1939. They go back to Germany, about ha– a substantial portion of them end up dying in concentration camps.

And she brings that to the fore immediately as she’s starting to dissent about this case involving the Mexican border.

And then she talks about kind of the narrow idea of asylum that the majority has captured here and also talks about how it’s really a way to circumvent the legitimate statutes that are on the books here, the way that the minority has read it.

She finishes… She takes about three times as long as Sam Alito had taken to deliver the actual opinion.

And the first thing he says before he starts to recount the temporary protected status opinion that he also has, he says, “If I had known what the dissent was going to say, I would have explained my ruling more.”.

And he just sits there kind of stone-faced, and everyone’s like, wow! And he definitely suggested he was blindsided. I have a feeling that she might have said maybe right before they were going on the bench. You know, hey, Sam, I’ve got something to say.

But then he then goes, with just anger dripping from his voice, to then detail what they were ruling in the temporary protected status case.

And as you just heard from Priscilla, that ruling really will affect a lot of people immediately. And the liberals dissented from that in a very strongly worded statement from Justice Elena Kagan.

But she chose not to read anything from the bench, probably because there had been enough fireworks for the morning at that point.

Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.

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