The Roberts Court Ignores Blatant Racism as It Locks the Courthouse Door on Families Who Fled Haiti

John Roberts and His Confederates on the Court Hand Donald Trump Another Win

The Roberts Court continues to issue cruel orders that ignore facts and bend the law to aid Donald Trump. Time and again, the Republican-appointed faction dominating the Court has declared that ordinary people are not even allowed to bring their claims to the Court.

This time, Sam Alito deployed judicial power to assert that U.S. residents who fled natural disasters and political collapse in Haiti cannot sue to prevent the Trump administration from terminating their residency. This ruling clears the way for Trump and his callous lieutenants to force these men, women, and children to return to a country in the midst of an undeniable humanitarian catastrophe.

The U.S. State Department classifies Haiti at Level 4, its highest travel warning with the highest probability of life-threatening risks. In bright red, it warns: “Do Not Travel” and notes that all non-essential U.S. personnel have been ordered to leave Haiti, citing rampant violent crime, gang violence, kidnappings, rape, and killings. Haiti has been under a declaration of emergency for more than two years, and its law enforcement apparatus has been largely unable to protect the safety of residents. The situation on the ground is so unstable that U.S. airlines do not even fly there anymore.

Yet, shortly after being sworn in by Clarence Thomas as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem began the process of vacating a previous extension of “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for 330,735 Haitians living in the United States. They were granted TPS by the U.S. government after the massive earthquake that rocked the island nation in 2010 and the political collapse of governance that followed. Haiti now has no sitting president or parliament, its key courts lack judges, and violent, rival gangs control much of the country. Doctors, lawyers, and others with any significant wealth are often kidnapped for ransom.

Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed racial animus toward Haitians in the U.S. and toward Haiti itself, calling it a “shithole,” as Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump falsely–and poisonously–claimed that Haitian residents in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets, a malicious lie that was widely rebuked. Then-Vice Presidential candidate, native Ohioan J.D. Vance, amplified the grotesque claim before later acknowledging it was false while arguing it was necessary to “create stories” to force the media into covering immigration.

This episode was and remains reprehensible, an utterly evil and vile act in my opinion.

But Sam Alito, along with his fellow Republican appointees, brushed aside that history. He wrote that none of Trump’s or his allies’ statements “was overtly racial” and asserted that the decision to end TPS for Haitians “could rest on” reasons having nothing to do with race, such as hostility to the notion of providing refuge.

So, according to the Roberts Court, key government officials can make policy changes aligned with obviously racist statements so long as they do not utter the n-word and can point to some “non-racist” alternative justification for their official actions.

This sounds a lot like the approach Alito choreographed for the legislatures of the former Confederacy to diminish Black political representation by claiming their motives were partisan, not racist, even when the effects have been definitively racist, with statistical precision. The Roberts Court’s active destruction of the Voting Rights Act is despicable beyond words.

The fact that the Trump regime also revoked TPS for 3,860 Syrians does not somehow make its targeting of the Haitian community non-racist. Syria, too, remains under a Level 4 threat advisory from the State Department, though the administration has lifted sanctions on the country as it squeezes its leader to aid Trump in the Middle East.

At the same time, Trump has turned America’s refugee program, designed for people fleeing disaster or persecution, into a vehicle to roll out the red carpet for white Afrikaners who claim to be victims of discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Trump’s policies can be cruel and racist and also just cruel, arbitrary, and capricious. But the Roberts Court has now declared that immigrant residents–no matter how long they have been in the U.S. or how deeply rooted they are in their local communities–do not have standing to sue the administration to challenge the revocation of TPS. As Justice Kagan noted, the Court is cutting off their ability to ask impartial lower court judges to hear their claims of racial bias and evaluate whether the Trump administration’s actions violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.

Ending TPS protections for these law-abiding members of our communities will most certainly result in death and profound suffering. And for what reason? Why must Trump act with such cruelty toward people who have fled disasters and sought refuge here? And why must the Roberts Court act with such eagerness to aid him?

These are shameful and destructive actions by a Court majority that owes half its members to a president who demands their fealty, and who increasingly–though not always–gets it in ways that wreak havoc on our people, our neighbors, and our world.

Like everything Trump touches, he is making the humanitarian crisis in Haiti infinitely worse. But he is not acting alone. This is the terrible world that Leonard Leo and his billionaire backers have imposed on America through the captured Roberts Court. This disaster is just one more example of the damage they have inflicted and yet another reminder of why we urgently need a robust Congress and a president committed to repairing such damage and preventing it from happening again.

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What I’m Reading:

• “The Crisis I Witnessed in Haiti”

  • This is a compelling firsthand account from Tirana Hassan, the CEO of Doctors Without Borders USA.

• The Congressional Research Service report on TPS

  • Generally, the CRS reports provide factually reliable and neutral recitations of the legislative history of various policy matters.

• The U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, which applies to persons, and not only to citizens, by its express terms.