{"id":908,"date":"2026-06-27T12:39:02","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T12:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=908"},"modified":"2026-06-27T12:39:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T12:39:02","slug":"will-this-supreme-court-ever-view-anything-as-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=908","title":{"rendered":"Will This Supreme Court Ever View Anything as Racist?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Trump-administration officials have made no secret of their desire to purge the United States of nonwhite immigrants. Donald Trump has declared, \u201cIf you import The Third World, you become The Third World,\u201d a common refrain repeated by his advisers. Trump has also said that immigrants have \u201cbad genes,\u201d that they are genetically predisposed to crime, and that they are \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country\u201d\u2014coming, as they are, \u201cfrom Africa, from Asia, all over the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Bear Makes Its Last Seconds Count<\/a><\/p>\n

In many instances, Trump\u2019s vitriol has been directed at Black immigrants, particularly from Africa and the Caribbean. He has said that allowing in Haitian immigrants was a \u201cdeath wish for our country\u201d and that \u201cthey all have AIDS,\u201d and accused them of eating household pets. He has referred to Haiti as a \u201cfilthy, dirty, disgusting\u201d place, a \u201cshithole\u201d country, while complaining that America doesn\u2019t take in enough people from Norway and Sweden. That last statement is crucial\u2014Trump has not proved hostile to all immigrants. Removing all possibility that the president\u2019s xenophobia is nonracial, the administration has implemented what is effectively a whites-only refugee policy that accepts solely South Africans of European descent.<\/p>\n

Much of this evidence, including statements by Kristi Noem, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, was presented to the Supreme Court when it considered in Mullin v. Doe<\/em> whether the Trump administration had lawfully ended temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Syria and Haiti. Yet the right-wing majority shrugged off the clear racially discriminatory intent in the president\u2019s rhetoric, and sided with Trump. As long as one can find a valid justification for the policy decision, the opinion suggests, then it doesn\u2019t actually matter what Trump said. The racist statements mean nothing so long as, in another, hypothetical universe, Trump could have made the same policy choice without making the racist statements first.<\/p>\n

The immediate impact of Thursday\u2019s ruling will be that 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians are now at risk of deportation, despite the dangers they face in their home countries. Yet the ruling has implications beyond immigration law, because it suggests that no amount of evidence of racial animus against Black people will be enough to convince a majority of justices that racial discrimination has occurred. As Guy-Uriel Charles, a professor at Harvard Law, put it to me, Justice Samuel Alito\u2019s majority opinion \u201cbasically sets up an impossible burden for plaintiffs because race is rarely going to be the sole justification\u201d for a policy.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,\u201d Alito wrote in his opinion. \u201cOne may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alito\u2019s insistence that \u201cnone of the cited statements\u201d was \u201covertly racial\u201d does not pass the laugh test. Trump\u2019s remarks were not just \u201covertly racial\u201d; they were the essence of racism: assuming the value of individual human beings solely on the basis of their origin, regardless of their individual characteristics. Shortly after the decision, the White House adviser Stephen Miller gushed, \u201cWe can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Justice Elena Kagan observed in her dissent, \u201cThe evidence is there, plain to see, in the President\u2019s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.\u201d Alito indeed does not repeat these plainly racist statements, instead substituting his own \u201crace-neutral\u201d explanations for what they might have said or meant. In reference to Trump\u2019s \u201cshithole\u201d comment, for example, Alito wrote that \u201ca person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations. The criteria for TPS designations guarantee that many, if not most, designated countries have such characteristics. Haiti is no exception. It is a very poor country, and living conditions there are unquestionably difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alito, in perhaps the most grotesque Alito Disclaimer ever put to paper, adds that \u201cpoverty 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\u2019s ills.\u201d Denigrating people who have suffered from their country\u2019s ills is precisely what Trump is doing when he talks about immigrants poisoning America by importing the values of the \u201cThird World.\u201d And yet, the justices are rewarding him for it.<\/p>\n

In his opinion, Alito notes that the administration had previously eliminated TPS protections for countries in Asia, Africa, South America. \u201cMost would regard this as a racially diverse group,\u201d he writes, as if racism toward all nonwhite people doesn\u2019t count as racism. But that\u2019s a perfectly coherent ideological principle, the same one that led to the eugenics-inspired racist immigration restrictions that Miller has insisted should be restored, right down to the preference for Nordic immigrants.<\/p>\n

Read more Vance vs. Rubio: Iran Edition<\/a><\/p>\n

The Roberts Court has been turning anti-discrimination law upside down for years. Its approach came into particular focus in May, with Louisiana v. Callais<\/em>, in which it determined that not<\/em> allowing Louisiana\u2019s government to dilute Black votes was racist. In that case, Alito insisted that forcing the state to draw a second majority-Black congressional district would be an \u201cunconstitutional racial gerrymander\u201d because Republicans were entitled to discriminate against Black voters if they argued that their purpose was partisan instead of racist. The Court reaffirmed that position in a subsequent case dealing with Alabama, after a lower court had found ample evidence of deliberate <\/em>racial discrimination, as opposed to the discriminatory effect of the Louisiana map.<\/p>\n

Mullin <\/em>now sets up an even more impossible double standard. If the government wants to discriminate against Black people, any pretext will do. \u201cAs long as there is a plausible basis\u2014any plausible articulable basis\u2014for the government\u2019s action, then the Court will look to that basis as sufficient,\u201d Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, told me, \u201ceven in the face of evidence that government actors were motivated by animus.\u201d If a Black person wants to prove they\u2019ve been discriminated against, however, no amount of evidence will suffice.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis Court sees race when it wants to, and blinds itself to racism in most other cases,\u201d Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine how egregious the statement would have to be to be considered \u2018overtly racial\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a \u201ccolor-blind\u201d Constitution that the architects of Jim Crow could love. Many of the devices employed during segregation, such as poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests, were superficially race-neutral. In fact, slavery itself could conceivably be race-neutral\u2014after all, one does not need to be a racist to seek cheap labor for a profitable business!<\/p>\n

Alito\u2019s insistence on ignoring the possibility of someone using a pretext to engage in racial discrimination is actually quite selective. In a 2009 case on affirmative action, Ricci v. DeStefano<\/em>, for example, Alito was happy to dismiss as \u201cpretextual\u201d the city of New Haven\u2019s reasoning for why it threw out test results in which white firefighters performed better than their Black colleagues (it feared a lawsuit). When a Virginia school implemented a race-neutral, class-based affirmative-action policy, however, Alito insisted that the policy was by definition racist because it changed the demographic composition of the student body.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not that Alito is always against reading motive into potentially racist behavior, or that he opposes looking past a pretextual policy reason for a decision that he sees as racist\u2014as long as the case is one in which white people could be perceived as the victims of racial discrimination.<\/p>\n

Francois compared the Roberts Court to the 1880s justices who opened the door to Jim Crow. That Alito \u201cpretended these statements were or could be race-neutral means that in some ways,\u201d the current Court is worse than that earlier one, Francois told me. At least the 19th-century Court had \u201cthe intellectual courage to state its racist convictions plainly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Housing Solution Trump Is Avoiding<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The justices did something worse than ignoring the evidence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nWill This Supreme Court Ever View Anything as Racist? - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=908\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Will This Supreme Court Ever View Anything as Racist? - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The justices did something worse than ignoring the evidence.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=908\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-27T12:39:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Will This Supreme Court Ever View Anything as Racist?\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-27T12:39:02+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908\"},\"wordCount\":1381,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/462413b58b5f7793ea7f1d20f7a307de.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=908\",\"name\":\"Will This Supreme Court Ever View Anything as Racist? 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