Alito rips race-based claim in high-stakes migrant protections case at Supreme Court

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito this week rejected claims that the end of deportation protections for Haitian migrants was racially motivated, urging a lawyer to explain how that argument works when the policy has been widely applied to migrants from many countries.

“You have a very broad definition — you have a very broad definition of who is white and who is not white,” Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said during oral arguments, disputing a claim by the migrants’ lawyer that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intentionally targeted non-white migrants when it moved to end their Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

The exchange came as the Supreme Court considered a high-stakes case over the Trump administration’s authority to end TPS protections for tens of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants.

The high court’s decision could strip their legal protections and have similar implications for hundreds of thousands of other migrants, meaning DHS could then decide to detain and deport them.

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Congress created temporary protected status as a form of protection for migrants fleeing war and natural disasters, and the law requires DHS officials to periodically check whether a country of origin qualifies.

Attorney Geoffrey Pipoly, representing the migrants during oral arguments, argued that courts have some authority to review DHS decisions on temporary protected status and that the government’s decision to end protected status for Haitians, in particular, was not in accordance with the law because it was motivated by racial bias against “non-white immigrants.”

“The president denigrated Haitian TPS holders specifically as undesirables from a ‘hole country,’ and days after falsely accusing them of ‘eating Americans’ dogs and cats,’ he vowed he would end Haiti’s TPS, and that’s exactly what happened,” Pipoly said.

Alito questioned the lawyer about this assertion, noting that the government was ending the temporary protected status applied to a number of countries.

“Do you think if you put in a queue the Syrians, the Turks, the Greeks and other people who live around the Mediterranean, do you think you could say that these people, all of them, are not white?” » asked Alito.

The judge added: “I don’t like to divide the people of the world into these groups.”

Alito began testing Pipoly in which category he would classify different nationalities, white versus non-white, leading Pipoly to assert that the bar for finding racial animus was low.

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“Regardless of how you go about classifying, simple dislike of an unpopular group is a sufficient basis,” Pipoly said.

The case centers on whether courts can review government decisions on TPS and the processes that led to those decisions. Lawyers for the migrants also argued that DHS officials failed to properly assess a country’s conditions or relied on illegal factors, such as whether the termination was in the national interest.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) told the Supreme Court that these decisions are not subject to judicial review and are solely within the jurisdiction of the executive branch. The DOJ has warned that allowing challenges could open the door to widespread litigation over immigration policy.

The migrants’ lawyers, meanwhile, argued in court papers that the Justice Department had taken “an extreme position that would shield any manifestly illegal executive action from judicial review.”

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Conservative justices appeared largely sympathetic to the Trump administration’s arguments, while liberal justices focused on whether Homeland Security’s alleged racial bias could be unconstitutional.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, suggested that Trump’s public assertion that migrants are “poisoning the blood of America” ​​would violate the government’s constitutional prohibitions on discrimination because it “showed that a discriminatory purpose may have played a role in this decision” to end temporary protected status.

Homeland Security has already terminated the legal status of migrants from six countries, including Venezuela and Honduras, measures the Supreme Court temporarily approved in previous emergency requests. The High Court issues a decision on the merits regarding the Haitians and Syrians, meaning it will be final and could apply more broadly.

The status of migrants from seven other countries remains suspended while the case is pending, including more than 6,000 Syrian migrants and nearly 350,000 Haitians, as well as those from Ethiopia, Myanmar, Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan.

The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its judgment by the end of June.

Bill Mears of Fox News contributed to this report.