The Supreme Court Backs Trump’s Gutter Racism

Samuel Alito led the majority on a despicable, precedent-shredding misadventure so that they could whitewash the president’s calumnies and expel the refugees he hates.

The Supreme Court paved the way for the Trump administration to deport more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian nationals in the United States who were previously protected by Temporary Protected Status designations. In doing so, the court effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry towards Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil-rights laws.

The court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe dealt with two separate issues. One was whether Congress had barred the plaintiffs from seeking judicial review of the Secretary of Homeland Security’s decision to revoke the TPS designation for both Haiti and Syria. The other was whether the Haiti TPS revocation was illegal because it was made with a racially discriminatory purpose.

Both countries at issue experienced tremendous upheaval in the 2010s. Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed as many as 160,000 people and destroyed large swaths of the country and especially the capitol, Port-au-Prince. The ensuing social and economic crisis fueled political unrest and ubiquious gang violence. Gunmen stormed the presidential compound and killed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and the country has yet to elect a constitutional successor.

Syria also saw massive civilian displacements during its thirteen-year civil war, which began in 2011 as a protest movement against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. More than 650,000 people died in the ensuring conflict. Assad fled the country in 2024 as rebel forces captured Damascus. While the new government has built ties with major powers to end economic sanctions and rebuild the country, much of Syria’s economy and infrastructure remains in ruins.

Federal law allows the secretary of homeland security to grant temporary protected status—also known as TPS—to foreign nationals inside the United States when they are unable to return to their home countries due to extraordinary circumstances, like natural disasters or civil wars. While the law does not create a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, it does generally protect TPS recipients from deportation without some other cause.

The Obama administration invoked TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Under federal law, the secretary of homeland security must conduct a review every 18 months to determine if the country in question “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation.” The law requires the secretary to “consult with appropriate agencies of the government” before reaching that determination.

Since TPS status can hinge entirely on an executive-branch official’s determination, those protected from removal by it became a logical target for Trump officials after they retook power last year. The second Trump administration has dedicated itself to ethnically cleansing the United States, both by shutting down legal pathways for immigration and by removing as many non-white people from the country as possible through deportation.

To that end, the Trump administration has constructed a vast network of deportation warehouses to pressure people to leave by holding them in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. It has dismantled the nation’s refugee-resettlement program with the sole exception of white Afrikaners from South Africa. It has even claimed the power to abolish birthright citizenship by executive order; the Supreme Court will rule upon the legality of that step later this month.

In keeping with that goal, Trump also issued an executive order last year that instructed executive-branch officials to take a more “limited” approach to TPS designations.........

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