The Supreme Court exposed the grisly underpinning of the Trump administration Wednesday as it ruled to subordinate minority voters to white ones, and seemed ready to allow the government to summarily end protected status for endangered refugees.
The administration is an amicus supporting Louisiana in Louisiana v. Callais — a landmark ruling in which the Supreme Court made the Voting Rights Act dead letter — and the petitioner in the consolidated cases Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s abrupt ending of the temporary protective status of Haitian and Syrian refugees.
In Callais, the Court’s right wing reinstated a discriminatory intent test that in the past had made the VRA so unusable that Congress intervened, clarifying in the 1982 amendments that legislative and congressional maps only had to have a discriminatory effect to be unlawful. Bucking that legislative history, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that plaintiffs could now only succeed with Section 2 claims by completely disentangling voters’ race from their political preferences — an impossibility in the South particularly, with its racially polarized voting. Their alternative option, he wrote, would be to draw a map that preserved Republican gerrymanders while also somehow giving minority voters increased representation.
The ruling could return the country to a pre-VRA status quo, where Black voters, particularly in the South, were carefully sorted into districts so their preferences would be swamped by those of the white voters. This disenfranchisement also had the knock-on effect of robbing huge swaths of the country of minority representatives.
When Alito wrote that the country and the South particularly “have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination,” he did so with the benefit of seeing how the Court’s prior blows to the VRA have played out on the ground. Since the Court did away with preclearance in 2013 — the requirement that jurisdictions with histories of racially discriminatory voting practices get changes in voting laws approved by the federal government — red states unloaded new restrictions. A study by the Brennan Center found that the turnout gap between white and Black voters has grown nearly twice as quickly in previously precleared counties than in comparable, non-covered ones.
And since 2021’s Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Court’s first assault on Section 2 related to discriminatory burdens on casting ballots, not one case has successfully challenged a voting restriction.
During briefings, attorneys for the voters presented extensive evidence of the dearth of Black political participation and representation in Louisiana prior to the passage of the VRA.
“In just five years, almost as many African Americans registered to vote in six Southern States as in the entire century before 1965,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her Callais dissent.
The conservative justices know that Callais makes Section 2 cases virtually impossible to bring, that it’ll have the same effect as their previous deteriorations of the VRA. They know that they’re making minority voters vulnerable to being redistricted or restricted out of electoral power — and they also know that most of those minority voters vote Democrat.
‘Shithole’ Countries
In Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, the racial animus was even more surface-level. The Trump administration ended TPS status for over a dozen countries, many in Africa, and most whose emigrants are likely to be people of color.
The administration has been completely candid in its racism towards immigrants of color; it was the crux of the campaign and is the guiding star of the administration. Trump called African countries, Haiti and El Salvador “shithole” nations, described Somalia as “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime,” and said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Vice President JD Vance stirred up a panic about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, later admitting that he made it up for media attention.
At issue in Mullin and Miot are the statuses specifically of Haitian and Syrian TPS holders. The DHS secretary is supposed to assess the conditions of those countries and consult with others before making a determination to extend or terminate the status. Respondents argue that then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t fulfill her statutory requirements before making her decision; the administration says that every part of that decision is immune from judicial review.
On Wednesday, a majority of justices (perhaps a bipartisan majority) seemed amenable to Trump’s position.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the most staunchly opposed to the administration’s arguments, asked Solicitor General John Sauer whether Trump’s various derogatory comments about the countries involved was proof of impermissible discriminatory intent, as a lower court had found. He said no, that the quotes were taken out of context and that Trump was referring to things like the crime rate.
“The position of the United States is that we have to have an actual racial epithet, that we aren’t allowed to look at all the context to include the president’s insistence that immigrants from certain countries — largely if not almost exclusively countries with Black African immigrants — are not allowed and calling these sorts of names and the types of things he said about Haiti,” Jackson said. “At the same time that it is the policy of the United States to encourage and welcome immigrants from places like Norway and Denmark and white South Africans.”
Kagan seemed less sold on the equal protection argument, pointing out that Trump had summarily ended TPS status for countries across the board. She seemed more dubious about Sauer’s process argument, in which, as she hypothesized, a DHS secretary could email with the State Department about a baseball game to fulfill the “consultation” requirement and still be immune from judicial review.
Even an unlikely win for the TPS holders would likely be fleeting; the requirements the administration must fulfill before it can end the status are not onerous, and could have been done in the time that administration has chosen to fight in court.
In just one day, the Court turned back the clock on the progress of multiracial democracy to 1965 and signaled that it will likely allow Trump to quickly end protections for hundreds of thousands of refugees of color and deport them to countries riven with violence and instability. This is the Make America Great Again mission.
All that said, Roberts is a good little nazi. Now, let’s see how he’s dealt with after he doesn’t have the First Felon to run interference for him.