“This is a victory 10 years in the making,” Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, told Fox News on Thursday. “We can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants from the United States.”    

— New York Times, June 26, 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court stripped Haitians of Temporary Protective Status

 

Donald Trump has never shied away from expressing repugnance for Haiti and its people. They represent everything he despises: they are poor, they are black and they are immigrants. So when the Supreme Court decided last week that 350,000 undocumented Haitians could no longer live here, Trump and Miller, the weasel in charge of making America white again, were thrilled.

 

Associate Justice Elena Kagan, on the other hand, was furious. She rebuked the 6-3 decision in a blistering dissent. The justices in the majority, Kagan wrote, had willfully ignored the virulent racism that motivated the Trump administration’s plan to send the Haitians back home. Describing statements Trump has made about Haitians as “repellent and racially inflected,” Kagan’s dissent recited a sampling:

 

“ Haitians are eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio.]’ . . . Haitians are also eating ‘other things too that they’re not supposed to be.’ . . .  ‘Haitians in the United States probably have AIDS.’  . . . Haiti is a ‘shithole country, which is filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.’ . . . Haitian immigration is ‘like a death wish for our country.’ . . .  Haitians, along with some others, are ‘poisoning the blood’ of our country. . . . ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries like Haiti [and] Somalia?’. . . ‘Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?’ ”

 

Trump’s history of racial animus toward Haiti and Haitians should have weighed heavily on the Supreme Court’s justices when they considered the case of Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security v. Doe, et al. 

 

Should have, but didn’t — not for the six justices in the majority, to be sure.   

 

Let me digress to provide some background. Haitians and immigrants from several other countries have been protected from deportation under a 1990 policy called Temporary Protective Status (TPS). It has allowed about 1.3 million immigrants to remain in the U.S. so long as upheavals in their homelands — armed conflicts or natural disasters, for example — would jeopardize their lives if they returned. 

 

After Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, TPS was extended to undocumented Haitian immigrants already living in the U.S. I was there for the earthquake and can attest that sending people back to Haiti in the aftermath was unthinkable. In succeeding years TPS for Haitians was renewed by the Department of Homeland Security, most recently when warring gangs took over the country and killed thousands of innocent civilians.

 

Haitians who had come to the U.S. typically found gainful employment, and according to local government and business leaders, became valuable employees and assets to their communities. About half of them live in the Miami area; others settled in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut and Ohio.

 

Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, denounced the Supreme Court’s decision on two counts: The dangers facing deported Haitians once they’re back home and the damage Ohio businesses will suffer without them. Springfield, home to 10,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants, would be particularly hard hit, DeWine said. U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, also decried the court’s decision, saying some communities dependent on Haitians for critical jobs would be hard hit, particularly in the healthcare sector. 

 

Trump couldn’t care less. He turned up the heat on Haitians soon after his second term began in January 2025. Before the year was out, his Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, declared that TPS would end in February 2026. (Her action also threatened 6,000 Syrian refugees who had fled their country during the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, along with more than 1 million immigrants from other countries.) 

 

Promptly after Noem’s announcement, five Haitian TPS holders went to federal court to block the administration’s plans to deport them. One was a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease; the others included a software engineer at a national bank, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, a college economics major, and a full-time registered nurse. They claimed that the government had violated their constitutional right to equal protection because the decision to strip them of TPS was motivated by racism.

 

They were absolutely correct, of course. Eliminating TPS was all about racism. But when their case reached the Supreme Court, the six justices decided — stunningly — that racism had played no role in the administration’s decision to end TPS, therefore the Haitians’ equal protection rights had not been violated.  

 

Unbelievably, the court’s 6 conservative justices brushed aside the dozens of racist remarks made by Trump, Noem, Miller and Vice President J.D. Vance. Justice Samuel Alito authored the majority’s decision.

 

“None of the cited statements by either the President or [Noem] was overtly racial,” Alito wrote. “And in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”

 

Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away racist statements made by administration officials. It was a leap to accuse them of racism when all they had done was opine about Haiti’s deplorable living conditions, the justices said. I ask you: Is that what Trump, Vance, Miller and Noem did when they spread false rumors about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield?

 

Sending hundreds of thousands of law abiding, working Haitians living peacefully in this country back to Haiti is nothing less than punishment for being Haitian.

 

But the Trump administration best not celebrate too soon.  A bill that would protect Haitians from deportation passed the House with bipartisan support in April. House Bill 1689 would give Haitians who were formerly covered by TPS three more years of protection. The bill hasn’t been taken up by the Senate yet. But its broad support in the House suggests that Stephen Miller may have declared victory prematurely. 

 

Among the bill’s many co-sponsors in the Senate, I can’t find a single Republican. Why am I not surprised?

 

Happy Independence Day.

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