Inside the Supreme Court's willful blindness to Trump's agenda

We understand that politics can bring on self-delusion about reality when it flies in the face of ideological goals, but the Supreme Court's purposeful turn away from the racism behind Donald Trump's immigration policies is both absurd and angering.

In twin decisions this week, the right-leaning majority on the Court allowed Trump to end "temporary protective status" for Haitians, Syrians and eventually others, including Afghans who helped our war efforts, and to eliminate access to asylum procedures at the border for whomever he chooses. They were bad decisions for a variety of reasons, but what really stung were the arguments offered that simply struck away any racial bias in our immigration policies.

Justice Samuel Alito's ruling for the 6-3 majority had to determine legally that race had played no role before removing the humanitarian protections to shield Haitians. His ruling said that Trump's many statements about Haitians were not "overtly racial," and that it was unlikely that race had been a motivating factor in the administration's decision to end the protections.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan suggested Alito was wearing blinders, adding "The statements fairly shout in their racial undertones and overtones alike" and to prove her point, she listed many, including discredited Trump statements that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio had been eating neighbors' pets, that Haiti was a "s-------" country and that he wanted immigrants from Norway instead. Haitian immigration is "like a death wish for our country." Haitians are "poisoning the blood" of the nation. Trump's remarks were "so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print," she wrote. Actually, Trump has invited White African immigrants from South Africa, but the point is all about race.

That Trump has an unwarranted obsession with immigrants and a strong liking for all efforts to remake this into a White Christian Nation are well established. What has become problematic is that in its zeal to support Trump, those six justices on the right apparently cannot see real racial impact in cases that range from immigration to unequal treatment by social services to policing and imprisonment cases to election redistricting issues.

Deportation to Violence
Even mindful that the Court decides how to so narrow the legal cases that it decides to consider, this court is building a distrust with the public for its failure to recognize the practical and very real impact of its rulings.

Haiti is in freefall; this week even a national police figure was kidnapped by rebel gangs. What does Trump or those justices think is going to happen to the hundreds of thousands of Haitians that the White House is panting to put on planes to Port-au-Prince? The whole reason for temporary protective status is to shield refugees from prosecution and social harm.

How does sending Haitians who have lived here for years "home" to chaos comport with the State Department warnings to Americans to stay away from Haiti as a dangerous place?

Alito did acknowledge that "political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago." But he concluded that the administration opposed immigration generally and had not used racial criteria in its decisions.

The same court majority said the same thing in allowing redistricting to eliminate Black-majority voting districts and in settling various recent policing cases. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been outspoken about a "post-racial" era that ignores the reality of college admissions, hiring and promotion practices, Justice department prosecution and punishment practices, mortgage redlining and other cases.

As The Huffington Post noted, Alito doesn't notice bias of any kind unless it is perceived to be anti-Catholic, his own religion, or anti-Christian in its effect. In this week's opinion, Alito said there were neutral reasons for lifting the Temporary Protected Status protections for Haitians, noting that temporary protections had been lifted in more than a dozen countries, including Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Cameroon, Nicaragua, Honduras and Venezuela. "Most would regard this as a racially diverse group of countries," he wrote. The plaintiffs contended that they were all "nonwhite."

When the case was argued in April, Alito suggested that "nonwhite" was not a meaningful category. Alito had told the plaintiffs' lawyer, "I don't like dividing the people of the world into these groups." Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who adopted two children born in Haiti, joined Alito's majority opinion along with Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Not What Was Promised
Roll back the clock and remember that what Trump said he wanted to tackle were the presence of undocumented migrants with backgrounds of violent crime. We are way beyond that now, evidenced by the botched campaigns to rebuild huge holding facilities for immigrants rounded up in courtrooms, from workplaces and schools for visa overstays and traffic violations.

The current crop of immigrant law cases concerns legal immigration methods, as ICE and border patrols pursue de-naturalizations, end legal asylum procedures, rush deportation cases through overloaded courts or skip legalisms altogether. The current cases involve humanitarian treatment of migrants and separation of families.

This case will prompt disarray in health care industries, where Haitians have found work, and in urban areas. In New York city, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already declaring a campaign against rules that "are putting so many people's lives in jeopardy."

It's not limited to courts. Behind the deportation program are ideologies that are specifically racial and nationalistic in the most peculiar way. Support requires actively looking the other way. At the same time, Texas education officials requiring St. James version Bible readings clearly have chosen not to look at the feelings or considerations of non-Christians.

One wonders why Trump is rushing aid to Venezuela after two devastating earthquakes to help the very people he had consistently demeaned as mentally ill criminals until the U.S. military grabbed former leader Nicholas Maduro. Oh yeah, Trump took control of that nation's oil industry, and suddenly we care about the Venezuelans we deported there six months ago.

On this 250th birthday as a nation that proudly displays a Statue of Liberty, we ought to be finding ways to celebrate our diversity, not to trample it.

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