The Supreme Court Backs Trump’s Gutter Racism
She cited Alito’s assertion that “poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character, and there is no justification for denigrating the character of Haitians who suffer from and bear no responsibility for their country’s ills.” At the same time, Kagan also quoted from Trump’s public comments about Haitians at length:
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].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.)
Alito, along with his five colleagues, divided up Trump’s statements into four categories. Some “express strong objections to the immigration that this country has experienced in recent decades” and to “many of the immigrants who have come here, particularly those who have come […] illegally,” which Trump “associate[s] with crime and other social ills.” Alito could have hardly sanitized them more than if he had used Clorox.
Other statements, Alito claimed, “express great displeasure with TPS” in general or “broadly denigrate the countries for which TPS designations have been granted—including Haiti—portraying them as hellish places to live.” Finally, Alito noted, some of Trump’s comments “malign Haitians who have come to the United States.” If only there were a shorter word to describe that.