Trump finds partner in supreme court in his war against immigration

Recent rulings have bolstered president’s pitiless campaign against people of colour fleeing violence and disaster

In the US supreme court, it seems Donald Trump has found loyalists in his crusade against immigration and immigrants.

In a pair of rulings Thursday, the court allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have granted people from Haiti and Syria the right to live and work legally in the US for more than a decade, and cleared way for the government to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border by physically blocking them from setting foot on US soil. And on Tuesday, the court granted border officials broad discretion to deport lawful permanent residents or green card holders.

In each of these cases, a 6-3 conservative majority on the highest US court offered the administration broad powers to circumvent or selectively administer immigration law – as it sees fit.

More broadly, this week’s decisions are among dozens of new administration policies that seek to radically restrict or remove immigrants of colour, and redefine who has a chance to live in the US and consider themselves American. Still looming is the court’s decision on whether Trump can deny birthright citizenship to thousands of people born in the US to parents of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants.

In the ruling allowing the administration to end temporary protected status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands people, the supreme court signalled that it is unwilling to grapple with the racist and nativist philosophy fueling Trump’s immigration policies.

This is how, on the same day that Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Trump’s repeated assertions that Haiti was a “shithole country” and that Haitians were “poisoning the blood” of this country did not prove this policies were “overtly racial”, Trump officials began to repeat these same racist tropes.

On Fox News , Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide and the architect of the president’s hardline immigration policies, spoke broadly against admitting migrants from “nations that have never had contact with the west, would have never developed the combustion engine or airplanes or televisions or radio or the internet”. Miller has made clear that the administration is aiming for a return to the nativist 1920s, when the US barred entry for people from much of the world and brought net immigration down to zero.

To enact its agenda, the administration has moved to largely block entry to immigrants from huge parts of the global south. Since taking office, Trump has paused nearly all refugees except for white South Africans and worked to reshape the refugee system to favor English speakers and white Europeans. In another policy that was struck down by a federal judge, the Trump administration stopped processing immigration applications for people from 39 countries largely in Africa and the Middle East – including applications for green cards and asylum. With the blessing of the supreme court on Thursday, it could once again implement a “metering” policy at the southern frontier, instructing officials to stand at the border line between the US and Mexico and block entry to migrants seeking asylum.

But the administration is not only closing the door to new immigrants; it is also seeking to uproot people who have been living and working in the US for years. With Tuesday’s ruling, the supreme court has empowered the government to stop legal permanent residents who are travelling if they have committed a crime of “moral turpitude”, declaring that officials do not need “clear and convincing evidence” of such a crime to place green card holders in immigration limbo. And the court’s TPS decision allows the administration to again strip people of their legal status.

“Never let anyone tell you this administration only goes after ‘undocumented’ immigrants,” said José Palma, a coordinator at the National TPS Alliance. “By trying to kill TPS, they are attacking people who are living and working here legally, paying fees and taxes, following all the rules. They are de-documenting people.”

Advocates are now calling on Congress to extend protections for Haitians, Syrians and other groups of migrants. Still, the ruling could be disastrous for the 350,000 Haitians and 4,000 Syrians who have fled political instability, economic collapse and civil war. “Families have started asking us questions that we are not able to answer. It is the saddest day of my life,” said Viles Dorsainvil, co-founder of Haitian Support Center and a Haitian TPS holder himself.

Each of the immigration decisions this week could have deadly, consequences for millions of people already in the US and those seeking safety in this country. People, including children, died when the first Trump administration began turning back asylum seekers at the border – languishing without medical care or access to safe housing.

The most dire consequences, in each case, will be borne by Black, brown and Asian immigrants who have fled war or persecution.

And yet, in a confoundingly circular argument, Alito argued that Trump and his administration were not racially motivated in their decision to deny TPS to Haitians. To prove this, Alito cited how Trump’s Department of Homeland Security “terminated the TPS designations for every country that came up for review” – including countries in South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. A policy cannot be racist, he argued, if it also antagonises not only Black Haitians, but also many other groups of people of colour.

“That conclusion is deeply troubling not just for immigration cases, but for the state of racial justice in this country more broadly,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney for the Syrian plaintiffs in the case.