Today the Supreme Court handed down a decision on Temporary Protected Status that I can only describe as a potential death sentence written in legal language. TPS covers hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian refugees currently living in the United States — people who fled gang-controlled streets, civil war, and state collapse. What the Court ruled, with Justice Alito writing the opinion, is that a lower court cannot challenge the President’s authority to revoke that protection. In plain English: the executive branch now has unchecked power to throw these people out of the country, and no lower court can stop it.
Haiti is, by any honest measure, one of the most dangerous places on earth right now. There is no functioning government. Violent gangs control entire regions. People returning there — some of whom have been in the United States for a decade, built businesses, raised children — will be walking back into the path of the same violence they fled. The gangs will see them as targets: people who left, who may have money, who may be seen as disloyal. What happens next is not a mystery.
The six justices who signed onto this ruling — Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Barrett — used convoluted legal logic to avoid confronting the obvious: this is a racially motivated policy. Trump’s own public statements going back years make that case. The lower courts saw it clearly. The Supreme Court chose not to.
I want to be direct about what that means. These justices, several of whom claim deep Christian conviction, voted to facilitate what will almost certainly result in murder, rape, and torture of innocent people. “Turning the other cheek” is not the same as closing your eyes while you send people to die.
There are still things we can do — supporting legal defense funds, applying political pressure, making this cost something for the people doing it. But we have to be honest: we cannot stop all of it. And that is a shameful thing to have to say as this country approaches its 250th birthday.
