Earlier this month, in a brief order with no recorded vote count, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s wish to “stay” (or block) a lower court’s temporary stoppage of its drastic new asylum rule.

The rule, announced by the administration in mid-July, bars asylum to most people who reach our southern border after passing through a third country, effectively shutting out Central Americans (though not Mexicans). It guts decades of asylum policy and abandons terrified refugees from some of the most violent countries on Earth to horrific fates.

Despite these incredibly high stakes, it took the Supreme Court little more than two weeks to grant Trump’s request. And the order will likely remain in place for months if not years, while the lower court works towards a final decision on the rule’s legality and that decision wends its way through the appeals process and probably back up to the Supreme Court.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor rebuked the majority for its action in a searing dissent that lamented the Trump administration’s penchant for short-circuiting normal judicial procedures and the current Court’s acquiescence.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor gestures during a visit to Tufts University in Medford, Mass., Thursday, Sept. 12, 2019. (Charles Krupa/AP)

To make matters worse, the Court did not offer a single word to explain why it sided with the administration in this major battle for America’s soul. The Court didn’t hold a hearing, either, so the public has no insight at all into the majority’s motivation. Unfortunately, the complete silence is not only arrogant, but it also feeds into suspicions of a political judgment.

Commentators have observed that silence is “ordinary” when the Supreme Court issues temporary relief. But that misses the point. There is nothing ordinary about partly dismantling the asylum system. And, as Sotomayor explained, it is extraordinary for an administration to march directly to the Supreme Court to ask for a decision before the case has been fully litigated in the lower courts.

Compare, for example, the Court’s June 2017 decision that partly lifted the lower court from blocking of one of Trump’s travel bans. That opinion provided 13 pages of reasoning, not only to the litigants and lower court judges but also to everyday Americans. The case was also deeply political and hard fought, but the justices chose to show their hands anyway.