Alexis Romero writes:

On Thursday, the Supreme Court blessed the Trump administration’s efforts to kick hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians out of the United States. This was one of three unspeakably wrong opinions released on the same day, all by a 6–3 ideological divide, and all written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito’s opinion pulls off a nearly unfathomable one-two punch of white racial apology: simultaneously backing all of the Trump administration’s claims of crime and filth across Black and brown countries, while also ruling that the administration’s decisions were not motivated by race. The opinion allows the White House to immediately begin shipping out people who have lived in the U.S. for decades under the temporary protected status program. This forthcoming removal—which will apply not just to Syria and Haiti but to 11 other countries—will now proceed without any judicial review of the proper process that Congress required when it established this program, and without any regard for the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.

Fritz Miot and Laila Doe are two foreign nationals who have lived in the United States for decades thanks to the TPS program. Miot is from Haiti and lives in California, where he studies Alzheimer’s at a research lab. Laila fled Syria in 2013 after her neighborhood was bombed in the Syrian civil war; she now lives in Illinois, “where she works as a behavioral technician for individuals with disabilities and cares for her elderly mother, a U.S. citizen.” Both Haiti and Syria have been designated as TPS countries since the 2010s, as a consequence of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Syrian civil war that began in 2011, and the difficult conditions in both countries that have continued ever since.

But the administration wants to kick Laila and Miot out of the country. Candidate Trump repeatedly made virulently racist remarks about the TPS program and the people that benefit from it. Most notably, he spit at a debate that Haitian TPS recipients in Ohio were eating the cats and dogs of their neighbors. Donald Trump and his administration described Haiti as a “shithole country” whose people were “poisoning the blood” of America and promised to use TPS revocation (as he had in his first term) during his second presidency as one of many tools to make America whiter. True to these threats, the second Trump administration began to end the TPS program one country at a time, as each came up for renewal under the statute. For 13 nations in a row, the Department of Homeland Security decided what no past administration had before: that the dangerous conditions that had justified an initial determination for TPS, and years of renewed investigations into those conditions, had somehow ended. After the government revoked TPS status for Syria and Haiti, Laila, Miot, and other plaintiffs sued. [Continue reading…]