By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) – Some big cases may be added to the US Supreme Court’s docket for its new term that starts next week including ones involving a detention policy used in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, regulation of prediction markets and a Texas law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.
The court, whose 6-3 conservative majority has moved US law steadily rightward in recent years, begins its nine-month term next Monday with arguments in an important case over whether oil companies like ExxonMobil can be held financially liable for helping drive climate change.
The justices have a host of cases they are still deciding whether to hear, and are expected to announce some of them this week. The court typically hears arguments in about 70 cases each term, and already has granted about two dozen cases.
MANDATORY DETENTION
The Trump administration has asked the court to let it continue detaining people arrested in the Republican president’s immigration crackdown without giving them a chance to seek bond, even if they have lived in the United States for years.
Bucking a long-standing interpretation of immigration law, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year took the position that non-US citizens already residing in the country — and not just people arriving at the border — qualify as “applicants for admission” subject to mandatory detention.
Under federal immigration law, “applicants for admission” to the United States are subject to mandatory detention while their cases proceed in immigration courts and are ineligible for bond hearings.
After the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the Justice Department, adopted the ICE interpretation, immigration judges, who are employed by the department, began ordering mandatory detention.
Kemal Hepsen, an immigration lawyer in Texas, said the issue has been fully aired in lower courts, with the administration losing 9 of 11 decisions by federal appeals courts.
“On the statutory question, there’s nothing left to percolate, and the alternative is a country where whether you can get bond depends on which state ICE drives you to,” Hepsen said.
PREDICTION MARKETS
Another dispute the Supreme Court may hear focuses on the regulation of prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which have experienced explosive growth. There are appeals at the court in cases involving Kalshi as well as Crypto.com and Robinhood, companies that have expanded into prediction markets.
The Trump administration has backed the prediction markets in the litigation. Polymarket last year secured an investment from a venture capital firm backed by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
Prediction market operators call their “event contracts” a type of financial derivative that should be exclusively regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency. A bipartisan coalition of states contends the sports-related offerings of these platforms amount to gambling, and should be regulated by their laws governing sports betting.
Federal appeals courts have been divided on the issue. If the Supreme Court eventually decides that prediction markets are gambling, the platforms would encounter a patchwork of bans, taxes, licensing regimes and criminal statutes.
The social and economic stakes make it likely the Supreme Court will step in at some point, according to Daniel Wallach, a sports lawyer in Florida who has followed the litigation.
“The stakeholder interest in this controversy encompasses 50 states, hundreds of Native American tribes, hundreds of casinos, multi-billion-dollar financial exchanges, online sports betting companies and the federal government,” Wallach said. “This probably is the most expansive and significant group of stakeholders that you could imagine for almost any case.”
TEN COMMANDMENTS
Several Texas families, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, have asked the Supreme Court to strike down the state’s 2025 law requiring public elementary and high schools to display the biblical Ten Commandments in classrooms.
They appealed after the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals decided the law did not violate the US Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on government establishment of religion or its protections for the free exercise of religion.
“Our nation’s bedrock principle of separating church and state means that families and faith communities — not politicians — get to decide what role religion plays in children’s lives,” Chloe Kempf, a lawyer at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement.
The Supreme Court struck down a similar Kentucky law in a 1980 decision called Stone v. Graham. But the current court has taken an expansive view of religious freedom.
The 1980 decision applied a legal framework that the Supreme Court discarded in a 2022 ruling siding with a football coach at a public high school in Washington state who was suspended for refusing to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games.
The Texas law “does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis or imams,” Judge Kyle Duncan wrote for the 5th Circuit. “It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”
Republican-led states in the South have led the way in putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Louisiana passed such a requirement in 2024, followed by Arkansas, Texas and Alabama. Critics have portrayed these laws as a component of what they see as rising Christian nationalism in the United States.
The Louisiana case also has drawn legal challenges, and the state wants the Supreme Court to weigh in on its law if the justices decide to hear arguments over the Texas law. The 5th Circuit in February let Louisiana’s measure take effect, but said it needed more information about how the mandate would be implemented before ruling on its constitutionality.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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