The Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe puts 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians at risk of deportation, while also handing down a gift to a legal system that keeps finding ways to look away from racial animus when it comes wrapped in policy language.
Who Pays for the Court’s Clean Hands
The people at the bottom of the hierarchy are the ones facing the consequences first. The ruling threatens 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians with deportation, and the article says the decision has implications beyond immigration law because it suggests that evidence of racial animus against Black people may not be enough to persuade a majority of justices that racial discrimination has occurred.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion. He said that “none 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.” He added, “One may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race.”
The article’s account says the Trump administration had made no secret of its desire to purge the United States of nonwhite immigrants. Donald Trump said, “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World,” that immigrants had “bad genes,” that they were genetically predisposed to crime, and that they were “poisoning the blood of our country” and coming “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.” He also said allowing in Haitian immigrants was a “death wish for our country,” that “they all have AIDS,” accused them of eating household pets, referred to Haiti as a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” place and a “shithole” country, and complained that America does not take in enough people from Norway and Sweden.
The article said the administration had implemented what it called a whites-only refugee policy that accepts solely South Africans of European descent. Much of this evidence, including statements by Kristi Noem, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, was presented to the Supreme Court.
What the Justices Chose to See
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “The evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.” That split captures the machinery at work: one side naming the racial violence in plain language, the other laundering it through the vocabulary of administrative neutrality.
The article quoted Guy-Uriel Charles, a professor at Harvard Law, saying Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion “basically sets up an impossible burden for plaintiffs because race is rarely going to be the sole justification” for a policy. It quoted Aderson Francois, a law professor at Georgetown University, saying, “As long as there is a plausible basis—any plausible articulable basis—for the government’s action, then the Court will look to that basis as sufficient,” even in the face of evidence that government actors were motivated by animus. Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, said, “This Court sees race when it wants to, and blinds itself to racism in most other cases.”
The article said the Roberts Court had been turning anti-discrimination law upside down for years. It cited May’s Louisiana v. Callais, in which it determined that not allowing Louisiana’s government to dilute Black votes was racist. Alito had insisted that forcing the state to draw a second majority-Black congressional district would be an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander” 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 racial discrimination, as opposed to the discriminatory effect of the Louisiana map.
The article also said Alito had, in a 2009 case on affirmative action, Ricci v. DeStefano, dismissed as “pretextual” New Haven’s reasoning for throwing out test results in which white firefighters performed better than their Black colleagues, and that when a Virginia school implemented a race-neutral, class-based affirmative-action policy, Alito insisted that the policy was by definition racist because it changed the demographic composition of the student body.
The Deportation Apparatus Keeps Expanding
Separately, President Donald Trump on Saturday said he is nominating Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, as the next director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump said on his Truth Social platform that Schroyer is a former U.S. Marine and a “PATRIOT with real operational experience,” and called him a “proven leader with DECADES of experience locking up the worst of the worst.”
The AP report said Schroyer hails from the same home state as the new Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a former congressman, and that earlier this month Mullin brought Schroyer onstage at a National Sheriffs’ Association event, calling him a “good friend of mine” and noting DHS had recently hired him. On Saturday, Mullin praised Schroyer in a statement highlighting the former trooper’s 29-year career and his work with federal and state partners on a U.S. immigration enforcement program. Mullin said, “President Trump made a great pick, and I’m confident Lance’s strong leadership and firsthand experience will empower the men and women of ICE to deport criminal illegal aliens, secure the homeland, and protect the American people.”
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official, said prior confirmed ICE directors have often been attorneys, though some state and local law enforcement officials have also been nominated, and said Schroyer’s background in Oklahoma suggested Markwayne Mullin likely had influence over the pick. John Torres, another senior ICE official, said Schroyer faces an uphill climb toward Senate confirmation but that his experience at the state and local level instead of the federal level might help.
The article said Schroyer’s nomination came after former ICE director Todd Lyons resigned at the end of May, that David Venturella, a former executive at a private prison operator, has been serving as the acting head of the agency, and that Venturella is expected to stay on as acting director until Schroyer is Senate confirmed, according to a DHS official speaking on condition of anonymity. It said ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration.
If confirmed, Schroyer will lead ICE at a time when the public mood has soured on Trump’s immigration crackdown, which sent surges of federal immigration officers into American cities to round up immigrants. The article said those raids sent tensions soaring and prompted clashes between protesters and law enforcement, leading to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Trump returned to the White House on a promise of mass deportations, and ICE has been a central executor of that vision. The agency is undergoing massive growth from a one-time injection of $75 billion last year, which has allowed for the hiring of 12,000 officers and increased detention capacity. Mullin, who started in his role in March, has promised to keep his department out of the headlines and has indicated a softer tone on immigration, although he is expected to align with the president’s priorities on mass deportations.
The AP report said ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration, a result of polarizing politics around the agency and immigration policy.