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The Supreme Court Once Again Endorses Trump’s Racism

The court took a look at Trump’s obviously bigoted handling of the Temporary Protected Status program and said, “Nothing to see here.”

Members of the National TPS Alliance rally at the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2026.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 6-3 that the Trump administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The case is called Mullin v. Doe. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, determined that the decision by former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to revoke TPS was “unreviewable” by the court. Further, Alito argued that the affected immigrants were “unlikely to succeed” on their constitutional claim that the administration violated their rights under the Equal Protection Clause. Alito then said that the administration can begin mass deportation immediately, refusing to allow people to stay here while their litigation is pending. 

In so ruling, Alito and the other Republicans on the Supreme Court have given constitutional protection to the openly racist and white supremacist policies of the Trump administration. When it comes down to it, the thousands of words Alito wrote could have been tossed out in favor of just 10: “Haitians have no rights white men are bound to respect.” 

Every Republican you know, whether they’re wearing a wife-beater or Elon Musk underoos, will respond to these objections with some version of “but temporary protected status is supposed to be temporary.” Which, duh, congratulations for successfully googling the definition of “temporary,” your Republican mother must be very proud. The disagreement comes because there is supposed to be a process for ending TPS, and that is a process the Trump administration refused to follow. 

The Haitian TPS program was first implemented in 2010 following a massive earthquake in their country. Before revoking TPS status, the US government is supposed to assess whether the country is “safe” for people to return to. 

Have you checked in on Haiti recently? The country functionally has no government. It is run by several rival gangs. Things are so unsafe that the Haitian national soccer team, which amazingly made the World Cup this year, literally cannot play soccer matches in Haiti. Somehow, the Trump administration has decided that none of this matters—that a country where you can’t even watch a sports game is nevertheless safe enough to deport people to. And now, Alito says that the Supreme Court isn’t even allowed to review that stance. But he is wrong, because the court can review the Trump administration’s process for making that wild determination. Or, more accurately, its lack of a process, given that there is no evidence that the administration conducted any investigation at all into the conditions in Haiti. (It’s not even clear that these people read a newspaper.) Instead, Trump just remembered that Haitians are Black and decided to send them back. 

And that leads to the second problem with this ruling. No matter what you think about TPS, it is flatly unconstitutional for the US government to make its decisions based on racial animus. Or at least it was unconstitutional until Trump took office. There is a mountain of evidence that racism was behind Trump’s TPS decisions. But according to Alito, Trump’s obvious bigotry is not something you can prove. Instead, he writes: 

“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications… And a person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in........

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