[1] Jose Luis Vaello Madero was a recipient of SSI benefits while living in New York, and then moved to Puerto Rico in 2013.

[5] The Court held that the "equal-protection component" of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause did not require Congress to allow Puerto Rico residents to receive Supplemental Security Income benefits.

[11] Justice Gorsuch wrote separately to call for the overruling of the Insular Cases, which stated that Puerto Rico and other unincorporated Territories could be ruled by the federal government "largely without regard to the Constitution".

[11] In Section I, Justice Thomas discusses how the Supreme Court has previously interpreted the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause and lists his criticisms of the logic behind Bolling v. Sharpe (1954).

Finally, he doubts the assertion in Bolling that "it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government" to not engage in racial segregation.

[14] In Section II, Justice Thomas discusses his alternative reasoning for Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), namely the Citizenship Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.

[15] In Section II-A, Thomas discusses how even Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) demonstrated the connection between citizenship and equal protection when Taney, "erroneously in [Thomas's] view", claimed that the "States' longstanding and widespread practice of denying free blacks equal civil rights conclusively showed that blacks were not citizens entitled to various constitutional protections".

Justice Thomas cited the debates surrounding these laws as evidence that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment may include an equal protection component.

[17] In Section II-B, Justice Thomas briefly discusses various decisions from 1868 (after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment) to 1896 (the year Plessy v. Ferguson was decided) that support the view that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was understood by some justices on the Supreme Court (especially John Marshall Harlan) to prohibit the federal government from denying equal protection of the laws.

[19] Justice Gorsuch began by claiming that "it is past time to acknowledge the gravity of this error and admit what we know to be true: The Insular Cases have no foundation in the Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes.

He noted the absurdity of full Constitutional rights applying on the uninhabited Palmyra Atoll, but not for 3 million people on Puerto Rico.

[23] Gorsuch accepted that both parties, the United States and Vaello Madero, assumed that the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause is "fundamental" and applies to Puerto Rico.

[24] Justice Sotomayor dissented because Congress's reasoning for excluding Puerto Rico from the Supplemental Security Income program fails rational basis review, and therefore violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause.

[27] In Section III, Sotomayor describes how even assuming rational basis review, a "deferential" but not "toothless" standard, the decision to exclude Puerto Rico residents from SSI is impermissible.