Supreme Court affirms Postal Service immunity
By: Maureen Groppe
USA Today
WASHINGTON - The supreme Court kept the lid on lawsuits against the U.S. Postal Service for delivery problems, ruling against a Texas landlord who said the federal agency deliberately withheld her mail as a form of racial harassment.
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In a 5-4 opinion issued February 24, [2026] the court said the immunity Congress gave USPS from lawsuits seeking monetary damages covers act alleged to be intentional.
..... The struggling USPS warned that without these protections, it could face a flood of lawsuits over its daily handling of 300 million mail pieces.
..... But the attorney for the landlord, Lebene Konan, said situations like hers - in which she and tenants did not get their mail delivered for years even after she filed dozens of complaints - are rare. Konan's attorney doubted allowing her suit to move forward would prompt a deluge of similar lawsuits, certainly not frivolous ones.
..... Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said the court did not decide whether all of the landlord's claims are barred by the ruling, just that the Postal Service can't be sued for intentionally not delivering the mail. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings.
..... Still, Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent that the majority expanded protections for USPS beyond what congress intend, covering missed mail "even when that nondelivery was driven by malicious reasons."
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Konan, who rents rooms in houses she wons in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, contends that postal workers refused to deliver mail to her or tenants for two years because they did not like the idea of a Blake landlord renting to White people. As a result, she said, some tenants moved out and others missed bills medicine deliveries and other important mail.
..... Konon said she submitted more than 50 complaints to USPS and asked the government watchdog that monitor the Postal Service to intervene before seeking compensation in court.
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A federal district judge said in 2023 she couldn't sue. that's because federal law protects USPS from claims "arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal mater." But after Konan appealed, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit said that protection doesn't cover a postal worker's refusal to deliver the mail, which is what Konan wanted the chance to prove.
..... When the high court took up her case in October, [2025] most of the debate centered on the meaning of the words "loss" and "miscarriage" in the postal exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act. In the majority opinion, Thomas wrote that both "loss" and :miscarriage' can occur as a result of the Postal Service's intentional failure to deliver the mail.
..... Frederick Liu, the Justice Department attorney presetting the Postal Service, argued that Congress wanted to avoid a "deluge of suits."
..... USPS delivers more than 300 million pieces of mail per day and receives 300,000 customers complaints per year alleging misconduct, according to the government. If even 1% of those complaints become lawsuits, Liu said, the number of suits field against the Postal Service would quadruple.