Supreme Court Strips Protections for Haitian & Syrian Immigrants in "Racially Inflected" Decision
Far Left
Thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in the United States are newly at risk of deportation after the Supreme Court ruled to allow the Trump administration to strip them of “temporary protected status,” or TPS. The program, designed for foreign citizens of countries the U.S. government believes are too unstable or dangerous to be returned to, often due to natural disasters or war, has been a major target of attack by the Trump administration and its anti-immigrant agenda.
“We are looking at the catastrophic deficit in the workforce in the United States if we allow this deportation machine and cruelty to take effect,” our guest, Haitian Bridge Alliance’s Guerline Jozef, says.
“This is just part of the Trump administration’s efforts to feed the detention and deportation machine and essentially halt immigration,” adds Lupe Aguirre of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “It’s about maintaining their campaign promises to root out people that they see as undesirable.”
Conservative legal activist Mike Davis floated an aggressive immigration crackdown this week if the Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration on birthright citizenship, including a call to prioritize the detention and deportation of women of childbearing age.Davis, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump who heads the Article III Project, framed his posts around the expectation that the high court will rule against the administration's position. He accused the justices in advance of preparing to "lawlessly" extend birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants.In one post, Davis wrote that if the court "lawlessly pretends we fought a Civil War and passed subsequent laws to give birthright citizenship to illegal aliens, we must ramp up third-country detainments and mass-deportations.""With no mercy," he added.He then went further, singling out a specific group as a target."We must start with birthing-aged women," Davis wrote, closing the post with a single word: "Adios."In a related post, Davis reiterated the framing, declaring that the Supreme Court was "going to lawlessly give away birthright citizenship to illegally aliens" and that the response should "make the top priority birthing-aged women."That post was attached to a message from Homeland Security official Markwayne Mullin, who had touted the administration's deportation efforts as targeting "illegal alien criminals" including "rapists, murders, pedophiles, and gang members."Davis is no fringe figure in the movement. He has been floated for senior legal roles in Trump's orbit and has positioned himself as an enforcer for the administration's most combative legal positions.His suggestion that deportation efforts should begin with women based on their reproductive capacity drew immediate attention on X.The Supreme Court has not yet issued its ruling in the birthright citizenship case.
A spat between two Supreme Court justices is putting Trump’s plans in jeopardy, a legal expert noted.Justice Samuel Alito looks poised to stay on as a counterweight to Justice Sonia Sotomayor after their "wacko interaction" spilled out into public view, Michael Popok said during a recent episode of the Unprecedented podcast.Sotomayor read her "powerful dissent" to Alito's majority opinion on an asylum case, Popok noted."So Alito was done reading his summary of his decision, and next up was Sotomayor, and she read big portions of her dissent, and really, I mean, accused the court of being heartless, of comparing it to that famous ship that was turned away by numerous countries filled with Holocaust survivors," Popok explained.Popok and his guest host, legal analyst Dina Doll, also brought up that Trump is hoping Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas will step down, opening the way for him to add a new conservative justice or two before the midterms."Honestly, I thought after that interaction, maybe Alito will not step down this summer because I think he sees himself as this necessary person, probably, to combat Sotomayor right now," Doll said. "It's just the ego in him."Doll continued, "Somebody like that thinks that they need to be in charge, that nobody else can carry the mantle."Trump Sweats as Alito Refuses to Leave Supreme Court Early?! | Unprecedented Podcast by Legal AFRead on Substack
“The pungent odor of Kristi Noem lingers in Washington.”Those are the opening words of longtime conservative columnist George Will, whose column in the Washington Post hammered the 6-3 Supreme Court majority for wrongly dismantling the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program depended upon by hundreds of thousands of immigrants.According to Will, the conservative majority deliberately ignored overwhelming evidence that Kristi Noem's actions were driven by racial "animus," and therefore "violated the pertinent law."As he pointed out, within three days of the former Department of Homeland Security head terminating TPS for Haitians and Syrians, which led to the court case that made its way to the nation's highest court, Noem publicly recommended "a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies" who "slaughter our heroes" and "suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars."He dryly added, "She [Noem] refrained from echoing Trump’s assertion about kitten-cooking Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. This marks her as a MAGA moderate. JD Vance spread the pet-eating fiction because he said creating 'stories' (his word) makes the media notice Americans’ suffering.""Surely justices are not required to ignore such rhetoric? And although thoughtful people disagree about whether, or how much, justices should consider the downstream consequences of their rulings," he suggested.Expressing his disappointment with the conservative-majority court, he offered, "Time and freshening breezes will cleanse Washington, dissipating the legacies of appointees like Noem, and of the president who chose them. The court’s mistaken ruling she provoked will be more lasting."
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York ripped into Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Friday night for saying that Republican control of Congress is the only thing keeping President Donald Trump from being held to account for his numerous scandals and abuses of power during his second term in the White House.Asked about comments made by the Speaker earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez told MS-NOW’s Jen Psaki that Johnson characterized future efforts to investigate for possible misdeeds or corruption by Trump, his family members, or members of his administration “as though it’s some partisan witch hunt,” she said. “But if you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.”Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to by her initials AOC, had been asked about remarks Speaker Johnson made at the annual summit of the right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group with close ties to Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that supports him.“If we lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment isn’t even the real concern,” Johnson told the crowd. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”The House speaker added, “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you, OK?”Johnson’s remarks unsurprisingly sparked a series of critical reactions, including AOC’s.“Mike Johnson saying the quiet part out loud: protect the powerful. Screw everyone else,” said Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Pa.).“The Speaker of the House just talked like a guy guarding an operation that can’t survive daylight,” said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). “Because that’s exactly what he’s doing.”“You don’t need a ‘protection program’ for people who did nothing wrong,” Levin continued. “You need one when you’re afraid of what the books would show. Congress is supposed to be a check on power, not the muscle protecting it. Johnson is a total disgrace to the office. November can’t come fast enough.”What Johnson is “talking about,” explained AOC in her interview with Psaki, is a Republican Party in Congress “running a protection racket” for Trump and his cronies, both in and out of government.“And we are already seeing that this Trump administration has run what some have called one of the largest pedophile protection programs in American history,” she continued, referencing the scandal surrounding the disgraced convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.“And so when Mike Johnson tells a group of wealthy donors, I’m the only thing standing between you and a consequence, that should rattle at the conscience of every American,” she said. “What he wants to do is create—or rather, not even create, because it’s already been created—but protect a class of impunity in America that says, ‘You can commit whatever crime, and so long as you pay a check to us, we will protect you.’ And that is a model of extortion in American politics. And you know what? That’s their pitch.”Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, responded to Johnson’s comments by detailing just a few examples of possible corruption by Trump that deserve much more scrutiny and congressional oversight.“Trump has almost tripled his net worth during this term. His sons bought drone companies and immediately received military contracts right before Trump started another war. Trump threw a crypto contest to see who could buy the most of his meme coin, with the prize being exclusive access to him in his presidential capacity,” D-Arrigo noted.“His son-in-law is getting billions in business deals from the countries and oligarchs wanting political favors. Large donors are spending millions to get pardons and investigations dropped. Trump is still actively covering up the Epstein files,” she added. “And these are just a handful of the things that were publicly reported on—imagine what we don’t know about yet.”D’Arrigo called on voters to help “flip the House” away from the Republicans and investigate these examples of grift and corruption as well as others.
Appearing to go off-script at a conservative gathering on Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) suggested that he is the last thing saving Donald Trump, and just as importantly, his supporters, from new investigations because he will run interference for them.Speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's annual summit, Johnson warned supporters that if Democrats take control of the House, they would "turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body" and target "Trump, his family, his Cabinet, his donors, and his allies."He then admitted "I run the protection program. I'll take care of you."The phrase "protection program" caught the ear of MSNOW's Steve Benen, who noted that after Trump returned to the White House, "the GOP-led Congress continued to show very little interest in legislating, but this time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president's many abuses and scandals."According to the analyst, with the bill for compliance coming due, Johnson was serving notice that the GOP would go into bunker mode if the House was lost to Democrats."It was nevertheless remarkable to hear a sitting House speaker declare, out loud and in public, that he wants and expects to run a 'protection program' — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House."
It looks like President Donald Trump has once again tricked Democrats into agreeing with him, whether they know it or not. In 2018, the president was dogged […]
It looks like President Donald Trump has once again tricked Democrats into agreeing with him, whether they know it or not. In 2018, the president was dogged […]
