Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised discrimination concerns on Wednesday during oral arguments, questioning whether the Department of Homeland Security terminated Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians based on animus toward their country. Sotomayor referenced past statements by President Donald Trump characterizing Haiti as a "shithole country" as potential evidence of discriminatory intent.
During debate with Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, Sotomayor recounted the president's earlier comments. "Now, we have a president saying, at one point, that Haiti is a 'filthy, dirty, and disgusting s-hole country,' and that he complained that the United States takes people from such countries instead of people from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark," she said. Sotomayor also noted Trump's prior statements associating illegal immigrants with poisoning American bloodlines, suggesting such rhetoric could indicate a discriminatory motive behind the policy decision.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson built on Sotomayor's line of questioning by referencing Trump's 2024 comments about immigrants who committed murders. In a radio interview that year, Trump stated: "You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes. And we've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." Jackson's intervention underscored the broader pattern of inflammatory language the justices appeared to view as potentially relevant to assessing whether the TPS termination involved discriminatory reasoning.
The case centers on whether the administration's decision to end temporary protection for Haitian nationals complied with administrative law and constitutional protections against discrimination. The questioning suggested at least two justices were exploring whether documented statements by the president could demonstrate that an otherwise facially neutral policy decision was motivated by bias against a particular national origin group.
