Supreme Court Debates Racial Motivation in Migrant Deportation Protections

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito challenged claims this week that the Trump administration’s decision to end deportation protections for Haitian migrants was racially motivated, pressing an attorney to explain how such an argument works when similar policies were applied to migrants from many countries.

“You have a really large — you have a really broad definition of who’s White and who’s not White,” said Alito during oral arguments. The Bush appointee questioned the assertion by migrants’ lawyers that the Trump Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intentionally targeted non-White migrants when terminating their temporary protected status (TPS).

The high-stakes case before the Supreme Court examines the Trump administration’s authority to end TPS protections for tens of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants. The court’s ruling could strip legal protections from these groups and potentially affect hundreds of thousands of other migrants, allowing DHS to detain and deport them.

Congress created TPS as a humanitarian protection for migrants fleeing war and natural disaster. The law requires DHS officials to periodically review whether conditions in an origin country still qualify for these protections.

Attorney Geoffrey Pipoly, representing the migrant plaintiffs, argued courts should have authority to review the government’s TPS decisions. He contended that terminating protected status for Haitians violated the law because it stemmed from racial bias against “non-White immigrants.”

“The president has disparaged Haitian TPS holders specifically as undesirables from a ‘s—hole country,’ and days after falsely accusing them of ‘eating the dogs and eating the cats of Americans,’ he vowed that he would terminate Haiti’s TPS, and that is exactly what happened,” Pipoly stated.

Alito challenged this characterization, noting the government’s TPS terminations applied to migrants from various regions and nationalities. “Do you think that if you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a lineup, do you think you could say those people, that all of them, are they all non-White?” Alito asked, adding, “I don’t like dividing the people of the world into these groups.”

When Alito pressed Pipoly on how he would categorize various nationalities as White or non-White, the attorney responded that “bare dislike of an unpopular group is a sufficient basis” for finding racial animus.

The central question in the case is whether courts can review the government’s TPS decisions and the processes behind them. Migrants’ lawyers have also argued that DHS officials failed to properly assess country conditions or relied on unlawful factors, such as whether termination was in the national interest.

The Department of Justice countered that such decisions fall exclusively under executive branch authority and are not subject to judicial review. DOJ warned that allowing such challenges could trigger widespread litigation over immigration policy. The migrants’ legal team responded in court filings that the DOJ had taken an “extreme position that would insulate flagrantly unlawful executive action from judicial review.”

During arguments, conservative justices appeared largely sympathetic to the Trump administration’s position, while liberal justices focused on whether the government’s alleged racial bias could be unconstitutional. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee, suggested Trump’s public claim that migrants are “poisoning the blood of America” could violate constitutional prohibitions on government discrimination.

DHS has already terminated the legal status of migrants from six countries, including Venezuela and Honduras—actions temporarily approved by the Supreme Court through emergency requests. The current case will produce a final ruling on the merits regarding Haitian and Syrian migrants, with implications that could extend more broadly.

The status of migrants from seven other countries remains on hold while the case is pending, affecting more than 6,000 Syrian and almost 350,000 Haitian migrants, as well as those from Ethiopia, Myanmar, Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling by the end of June, potentially reshaping immigration policy and the lives of hundreds of thousands of migrants currently protected under TPS.