Sharp dissents from Supreme Court Justices read like 'primal scream' for help: analyst

MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace likened Supreme Court dissents to a "primal scream" after a spate of decisions.

Wallace was highlighting parts of Justice Elena Kagan's dissenting opinion in immigration cases that end legal protections for recipients of temporary protected status.

"The justices to put so much storytelling in a dissent does feel like a real primal scream for people to wake up and see what the human toll is of today's decisions," Wallace said.

She read excerpts of Kagan's dissent that recounted the stories of Syrian and Haitian nationals and "put human beings at the center of today's stories," Wallace said.

"Consider Laila Doe, who fled Syria with her daughter in 2013 after her neighborhood was bombed," Kagan's dissent read. "Without TPS, she will have to leave her mother and return to a still ravaged, violent, and dangerous country."

Wallace also looked at a part of Kagan's dissent that talked about Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, "a Haitian national who has held TPS for fifteen years," according to Kagan. "Miot suffers from Type 1 diabetes, which is easily treated in the United States, but in Haiti, the same disease can be a death sentence."

"He lives in California, where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer's, a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization," Kagan wrote.

Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst, described the opinions from Justice Samuel Alito and others who voted to pull back TPS protections as "crabbed." She added that Justice Alito was "angry" at Justice Sonia Sotomayor being "upset" like Kagan.

Lithwick also called Justice Alito and others in the majority opinion "vulcans" who saw it as their job to take on a "hyper-textual approach," as opposed to the human-oriented approach that she and Wallace saw in the reactions of Kagan and Sotomayor.

"What they end up doing is ignoring the explicit intent of Congress," Lithwick said about the justices in the majority opinion. "They end up absolutely circumscribing judicial power of review."