The Supreme Court's Willful Blindness In The Face Of Racial Animus

Marc H. Morial 
President and CEO
National Urban League

“The majority claims to see no evidence that race played any role in the Haiti decision. But the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.” 
 
The President’s allies on the Supreme Court have had to jump through some hoops to justify their decisions supporting his reckless and discriminatory policies. But Justice Samuel Alito’s claim not to see racism in the effort to end Temporary Protective Status for Haitians defies belief.
 
As Justice Kagen noted in her dissent, even the President’s own lawyers avoided repeating his shocking slur against Haiti and other predominantly Black nations when he demanded, “Take them out.” But even more telling than the slur was the response in the room: ““Because if you do, it will be obvious why.”
 
“Obvious” to everyone but Trump’s allies on the Supreme Court, apparently.   

The Trump administration did not decide to deport protected Haitian and Syrian immigrants because it determined those nations are safe. It arbitrarily determined they were “safe” so that it could deport those immigrants.  The Department of State maintains a strict “Level 4- Do Not Travel” advisory due to the risk of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care” in Haiti and “terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime, and armed conflict” in Syria.
 
Haitian and Syrian TPS holders are now expected to do what Americans are explicitly warned against.
 
Just as troubling as the human consequences of the Court’s ruling is its reasoning. The public record is littered with examples of the President’s animus toward Haitians. He stunningly advanced a baseless – and widely debunked - claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of residents in Ohio. At other times, he suggested Haitian immigrants were bringing disease into the United States and accused them of “destroying” a community’s way of life.

As Kagen noted, these statements “fairly shout” that race played a role in the decision. Justice Alito and his colleagues in the majority have turned a deaf ear.
 
The administration has made no secret of its intent to base immigration policy on race. It has turned our refugee program into a “whites only” pathway to the United States – even planning a “welcome bag” containing racist literature.  The President has invoked Nazi terminology to dehumanize immigrants from South America, Africa, and Asia.  He’s expressed a preference for immigrants from “nice countries” like Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, whose populations are more than 90% white.
 
Just as it did with its egregious Callais decision, the Court has embraced the fiction that blatant racial bias can somehow be walled off from policymaking, as long as its not explicitly written into the law itself.

When leaders repeatedly vilify a particular group and then act in ways that strip that group of legal protections it is not unreasonable to ask whether those words and actions are connected. The Court’s majority, however, demands a level of proof so narrow that it is nearly impossible to meet. In doing so, it effectively immunizes decision-making from scrutiny, even when there is clear evidence of bias in the public sphere.
 
The consequences of the Court’s decision are not abstract. They will be measured in families torn apart, in lives upended, and in the erosion of a principle as old as the Constitution itself: that justice must be blind to race, not blind to racism. When the highest Court in the land refuses to confront discrimination so clearly etched into the public record, it does more than misinterpret the law—it signals that some forms of prejudice can be ignored, excused, or even sanctioned. And that is a precedent far more dangerous than any single decision.
 

 
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