The Supreme Court issued a 9-0 ruling Monday morning upholding the constitutionality of a current law that bars illegal immigrants from seeking green cards. The court ruled that migrants that entered the country illegally and later received  Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are still ineligible to apply for permanent residency.

According to The Daily Wire:

Justice Elena Kagan, widely recognized as one of the Court’s more liberal justices, wrote the unanimous opinion, upholding a rule that barred “unlawful entrants” who later received Temporary Protected Status from applying to remain in the United States. Temporary Protected Status technically “gives foreign nationals nonimmigrant status,” Kagan noted, but TPS does not rubber-stamp an “unlawful entry.”

The TPS status “applies to people who come from countries ravaged by war or disaster. It protects them from deportation and allows them to work legally. There are 400,000 people from 12 countries with TPS status,” according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

The Court was called upon to decide whether a “couple from El Salvador who have been in the U.S. since the early 199s” who were given protected status in 2001 but who originally “entered the country illegally” were actually “admitted” into the United States when they were given protected status, enabling them to apply for a green card.

Kagan was clear, in her opinion, that they were not. “The TPS program gives foreign nationals nonimmigrant status, but it does not admit them. So the conferral of TPS does not make an unlawful entrant…eligible,” she wrote.

In Justice Kagan’s opinion, she noted that had Congress intended to grant “admission” into the country along with Temporary Protected Status the law would have been specifically written as such.

The unanimous ruling is a disappointing loss to liberal lawmakers that favor open borders.