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Tiktok’s Final Appeal to the Supreme Court Didn’t Go Too Well
Photo: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
The looming TikTok ban is barely a week away and the company is running out of time to do anything about it. On Friday, the Supreme Court heard last-minute arguments about the ban, with TikTok angling for an intervention or, at least, a temporary ruling to buy it a bit more time. They didn’t go especially well for TikTok — even justices who sounded sympathetic to the company’s arguments about free speech seemed satisfied by the government’s core national security argument.
As a matter of law, in other words, it’s looking like the ban is going to happen, and probably right before Donald Trump once again takes office. This is a completely unprecedented event — a massively popular app with a major cultural and economic footprint in the United States might just get switched off — but also something that the incoming president, who effectively originated the ban in the form of an executive order in 2020 but has since become aware that some people on the app actually like him and has also raised a bunch of money from one of its biggest American investors, now says he doesn’t want to happen.
The court was concerned, mostly, with the substance of the law, which requires that TikTok either be sold to an American company or banned entirely, but the justices did briefly touch on the urgent question of what might practically happen next, in the real world. Congress passed a law. Trump can say he doesn’t support it, but it’s still on the books, and it passed with substantial bipartisan support. If he really wants to stop it he’ll have to do something about it, and the available options are all pretty messy.
According to the law he could, as President, temporarily pause the ban if the company demonstrates its intent to imminently sell, but TikTok parent company ByteDance has strongly suggested that this isn’t possible, not least because of tightening Chinese export controls around algorithms and AI. Should ByteDance agree to offload an algorithmically stripped-out version of TikTok — something at least one credible buyer has nonetheless expressed interest in — Trump, who would also be able to unpause the ban, would have a great deal of influence over the terms of the deal. But the app would almost certainly experience an interruption in service and return, eventually, as something fundamentally different.
Near the end of the hearing, though, Justice Kavanaugh floated the possibility that’s most aligned with how Trump is talking about this at the moment: “Could the president say we are not going to enforce this law?” Indeed, this is an approach he’s been implying, it certainly matches his mental model of how government should work — TikTok is unbanned if I say so — and it seems like something that he might at least attempt.
Kavanaugh helped answer his own question: Trump could do this, he noted, but it would create serious practical problems. One way the ban is intended to work is by making it illegal to provide “services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application,” meaning that Apple and Google, which between them maintain the app stores on virtually all of America’s smartphones, would be legally required to delist the app. A promise by Trump not to enforce a TikTok ban, or to unilaterally and/or counterfactually declare TikTok in compliance with the law, would leave Apple and Google in a risky position. They could relist an app that’s still technically illegal but which the President says is actually fine in support of a company to which they have no particular reason to help and which is in fact, in Google’s case, a direct competitor.
Or they could just say: Hey, hosting a service that has been declared a “FOREIGN ADVERSARY CONTROLLED APPLICATION” by lawmakers isn’t worth the trouble even if the President says he’s personally totally cool with it. This would be prudent unless, of course, such an action would be interpreted as a slight against the President, and wielded against them publicly or privately, in which case two of American’s largest companies, each facing ongoing antitrust cases, might just have to hire a few dozen more lobbyists and OFAC attorneys and figure out how to make things work. Welcome to the new tech industry.
new video loaded: Another Night of Violent Protests Outside a Newark ICE Detention Center
transcript
transcript
Another Night of Violent Protests Outside a Newark ICE Detention Center
Protesters and the police clashed again outside of an ICE detention center in New Jersey on Saturday night.
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“Shut down Delaney Hall.” “Shut down Delaney Hall.” “Mikie Sherrill, do better. Mikie Sherrill, do better.”
By Cynthia Silva
May 31, 2026
Family visitation at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center is being restored to at least part of the facility, New Jersey’s governor and US homeland security officials confirmed on Sunday morning, after a week during which heated demonstrations at the site were met with aggressive policing tactics.
Meanwhile, families of detained immigrants grappled with conflicting information about exactly whom among them would get visitation after the announcement from governor Mikie Sherrill and the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And local officials by Sunday had also indefinitely imposed an overnight curfew beginning at 9pm for a blocked-off area including Delaney Hall.
Delaney Hall visitation had been canceled after detained immigrants began carrying out an ongoing hunger and labor strike inside the detention center – which prompted protests outside the facility in support of those striking.
Facility staff confirmed to the Guardian on Sunday that what are known as units 1 and 3 were given visitation beginning at about noon and 2pm local time, respectively.
Unit 1 is a women’s section of the facility. Unit 2 is where the majority of the hunger-striking detainees are based, and it was unclear on Sunday whether it would have access to family visitation.
Sherrill’s office and the private prison company GEO Group, which runs the facility, did not respond to a request for comment. The road leading to Delaney Hall is now fully blocked by police, except for families attempting to visit detained loved ones, state officials announced on Sunday afternoon.
The governor’s announcement and subsequent confusion by families followed a night of violent clashes outside the facility between local officials and protesters. In the aftermath of that, Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, responded by activating a curfew for the area surrounding Delaney Hall.
The curfew would be in place nightly from 9pm to 6am “until further notice”, said Baraka’s office, which threatened arrest or legal action if people did not disperse during that time.
On Sunday morning, Sherrill and other top New Jersey state officials said that three people were arrested on Saturday night as a result of clashes with police. State officials said those arrest happened after a group of protesters attacked police and a barrier.
The Delaney Hall protests and clashes have become the latest flashpoint in the growing opposition to the aggressive anti-immigrant tactics Donald Trump’s administration has implemented nationwide throughout his second presidency.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains immigrants in its network of facilities across the US while the cases of those detained play out in courts.
ICE detention centers have been repeatedly criticized for harsh conditions.
Hakeem Jeffries, the top US House Democrat of nearby New York, conducted an oversight visit of Delaney Hall on Sunday, and said the conditions of confinement “shock the conscience”.
On 22 May, a group of immigrants detained inside Delaney Hall detention announced a hunger and labor strike inside the facility, demanding improved conditions, medical care, a meeting with Sherrill and for their immigration cases to proceed. Between 300 and 400 detainees have since participated in the strike.
Protests began shortly thereafter, with lawmakers attempting to visit the facility. The facility gained further national attention after ICE officers pepper-sprayed US senator Andy Kim, a New Jersey Democrat, outside the facility during a skirmish there on Monday.
ICE officers have used pepper spray as well as stun guns throughout the demonstrations. They have also shoved and arrested protesters.
On Friday, Sherrill and other top New Jersey officials announced that state police would replace ICE officers outside Delaney Hall. The state police set up road blocks around half a mile on either side of the detention center.
That night clashes erupted after state police officers began moving in on protesters. State police officials on horseback moved through the crowd. Other state police officers in riot gear shot teargas canisters at protesters, aggressively shoving demonstrators and arresting six.
Advocates present at Delaney Hall on Saturday repeatedly criticized Sherrill, a Democrat, for her response to the protests.
“The escalation that happened [on Friday] was ten times worse than what ICE was doing to everyone prior nights,” Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigrant Coalition, said in an interview on Saturday outside of the facility. “If anything, the escalators were the state police.”
A statement from Sherill on Saturday announcing the restoration of family visitation at Delaney Hall claimed DHS had “met our demand”. But DHS refuted the governor’s statement.
“To be clear: Visitation was only suspended because of violent riots,” a DHS spokesperson said. “Now that we have a secure perimeter, visitation can resume.”
Methodology
The illustrations of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s plumbing system were drawn from National Park Service documents produced as part of its renovations and reviewed by people with knowledge of the project. The layout of the expansion joints was derived from photographic evidence and a 2013 report released as part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
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