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Today, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to begin mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Haitians who have been living and working legally in the United States for years. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: By a vote of 6 to 3, the court's conservative supermajority ruled that the president has virtually unchecked power to end the temporary protected status program known as TPS. Congress enacted the law in 1990 to allow fully vetted and eligible migrants living in the U.S. to remain and work here legally if they cannot return safely to their home countries because of natural disasters, armed conflicts and other extraordinary conditions. Since the law's enactment, every president, Republican or Democrat, has embraced it.
But Trump has systematically tried to end the program. And today, the Supreme Court gave him the tools to do it in two cases. One involved some 350,000 Haitians who were granted TPS status in 2010 after a devastating earthquake and roughly 7,000 Syrians granted TPS status during that country's civil war.
Writing for the court's conservatives, Justice Samuel Alito said that the TPS statute bars any court review of how the president and his Department of Homeland Security have used their authority to end TPS status. At the same time, he also rejected the Haitians' separate constitutional claim that the decision to eject them from the country was based on racial prejudice. Quote, "political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago," he said. But whatever one may think of those statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designations was based on the race of the Haitian people.
Writing for the liberal dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan lambasted that claim, saying, quote, "the evidence is there, plain to see in the president's own statements," which even his own lawyers cannot bear to repeat in court - statements which she quoted at length in which Trump referred to Haiti as a filthy, dirty, disgusting s-hole country, Trump's debunked claims that Haitians living in the U.S. were eating their neighbors' pets and his assertions that Haitians are poisoning the blood of the country in addition to his repeated comments asking, quote, "why can't we have more people from Norway and Sweden?"
Jeh Johnson, who served as Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, reacted to the court's decision this way.
JEH JOHNSON: The majority seems to be willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt here although they're not overtly racist. It comes about as close as you can to being overtly racist.
TOTENBERG: Ohio state law professor Cesar Garcia Hernandez had a more pointed reaction.
CESAR GARCIA HERNANDEZ: What is racial if not describing the poisoning of our blood and similar comments that the president has made?
TOTENBERG: And University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq.
AZIZ HUQ: So it's very hard to come away from this opinion with a sense that there is ever going to be a situation in which the court, even when it has record evidence in front of it, finds that there is racial discrimination against a racial minority.
TOTENBERG: That said, in practical terms, there are big consequences, not just for the Haitian community, according to Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, the largest faith-based immigration nonprofit in the U.S.
KRISH O'MARA VIGNARAJAH: This decision affects 350,000 Haitians, and a third of those Haitians work in our healthcare sector. They are caregivers. They are doctors. And I think part of the bipartisan support was a recognition of the local impact it would have on Americans who are obviously desperately seeking care for themselves, for their kids and for their parents.
TOTENBERG: That bipartisan support was recently demonstrated when the House of Representatives passed a bill to extend TPS status for Haitians. But even if it were to pass the Senate, President Trump would almost certainly veto the bill. In a second immigration decision today, also written by Justice Alito, the court's conservative majority sided with the Trump administration in making it much harder for those seeking asylum in the U.S.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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