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On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Mullin v. Doe, a discrimination challenge against the Trump administration’s efforts to remove lawful temporary protected status from immigrants from Syria and Haiti. This argument comes after years of racist remarks against minorities made by President Donald Trump, both as a candidate and an elected official. These oral arguments also happened the same day the court announced its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the 6–3 majority declared total victory on racial progress as a justification for allowing the removal of majority-minority voting districts. Madiba Dennie, deputy editor and senior contributor at Balls and Strikes, joined Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick on this episode of Amicus to discuss the relationship between the two cases and the arguments that were on display. Dennie is the author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back. This portion of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Temporary protected status is a federal humanitarian program that protects folks against deportation. Can you just tell us how the program works and why it’s important?

Madiba Dennie: TPS is a congressionally created program established in 1990. And the whole point of the program is that people shouldn’t get removed to countries where they’ll be in danger. TPS says that if there are extraordinary and temporary conditions in a country, things like civil war or natural disasters, then it is a policy of the United States that we do not send people to, potentially, their deaths by removing them to those same countries.

So the Department of Homeland Security will review conditions in countries and they will sometimes make these designations which could last anywhere from six months to 18 months, and they come up for renewal. And the default is, they will renew it unless the conditions have subsided.

But that’s not what the Trump administration wanted to do. They just wanted all of these Black and brown people out of the country as soon as possible. And so they just started terminating TPS........

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