Photo above: Elected officials, including Councillor Ruthzee Louijeune (speaking) and advocates for immigrants gathered outside the Massachusetts State House on June 25 to denounce the US Supreme Court ruling that paves the way for deportation of legal immigrants from Haiti and Syria with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Photo by Chris Lovett
Last Thursday’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision that clears the way for the Trump administration to end protected status for Haitians should disgust all Americans— and not only because it will disrupt lives and inconvenience folks who like the sweet little Haitian lady who cared so well for their dying grandmother.
Yes, the decision is bad for the economy and will cause disruptions.
Yes, booting out 350,000 people who contribute centrally to the workforce, pay taxes, and, more broadly, help society here is stupid and short-sighted.
Yes, sending them back to a country that is objectively more dangerous and dysfunctional than it was when TPS was enacted in 2010 is cruel and twisted.
But, Americans should be most outraged that these six justices have co-signed the virulent racism of this president and his appointees who gleefully traffic in a brand of anti-Black, white supremacist rhetoric that underpins this regime’s fundamental world view.
The majority opinion insists that Trump’s abuse of Haitians has nothing to do with race— or that it’s “race neutral.”
That’s bullshit.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan rightly calls out her colleagues: The evidence, she writes, “includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
For her part, she goes through a hit-list of Trump’s diatribes about Haitians:
They are “eating the dogs . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” Haitians in the United States, he mused, “probably have AIDS.”
Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.”
Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country.
How about this one: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”
According to the majority on the court, none of that garbage is “overtly racial.”
Trump’s record of racism is too long and sordid to outline in this space, but, as Kagan notes correctly: “The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”
That alone, she correctly notes, should have been enough for a majority of justices to rule in favor of keeping the TPS designation in place. Instead, the six justices who joined the majority— Chief Justice Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett— disgraced themselves by green-lighting racist propaganda against Black people in America, ruling it fair game.
That should alarm every American.
There are millions of Haitian people and their descendants living in the United States who will be unaffected by this ruling, which applies strictly to those who arrived as TPS holders after 2010.
But, make no mistake: This decision sends a chilling message to all people with roots in Haiti: You are judged as inferior and unwelcome in the eyes of this federal government, including the highest court in the land.
Mayor Wu made it plain last Thursday in her emotional and heartfelt response: This assault on Haitians is an assault on all of us.
“Today, Donald Trump’s enablers on the Supreme Court handed down a decision that disregards established law, basic human dignity, and fundamental American values,” the mayor said. “Today, our Haitian … neighbors, friends, coworkers, and family members are hearing a message from the highest court in this country … that because they were born in certain places around the world, their futures are somehow less worthy of protection.”
“That,” she said, “is as un-American as it gets.”
