In her dissent from one of the Thursday Supreme Court decisions on immigrant rights, Justice Elena Kagan made sure Donald Trump’s litany of racist remarks would be a forever part of the court’s historical record.
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The liberal justice used her dissent in a case where the conservative majority gave the president the legal authority to strip Temporary Protected Status from over 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, among others, to call out the president for his flagrant racism.
On MS NOW, legal analyst Lisa Rubin read directly from Kagan’s blunt dissent, telling the panel, “Justice Kagan in her dissent doesn’t just summarize the statements from the president and from Kristi Noem, who was then the head of Homeland Security, but makes them plain, and I want to read to you from her dissent because she gathers them up.”
Looking at her laptop, she read, “’Haitians are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live in Springfield.’ And ‘Haitians are also,’ and this is the quote, ‘eating other things too that they’re not supposed to be.’ And Haitians in the United States, quote, ‘Probably have AIDS’. And Haiti, is quote, ‘A whole country which is,’ quote, ‘filthy, dirty and disgusting,’ end quote.”
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She continued, “And, Haitian immigration is, quote, ‘Like a death wish for our country.’ And Haitians, along with some others, are quote, ‘Poisoning the blood,’ end quote, of our country. And finally, this is a statement from the president that ‘we only take people from s-hole countries like Haiti and Somalia. Why can’t we have some people from Norway and Sweden?’”
“And then she [Kagan] goes back to something that was talked about at oral argument when she asked one of the lawyers for the Haitians, ‘So it’s not Haiti particularly, it’s all these countries have people of color, as opposed to Denmark and Scandinavia, you know Scandinavia generally, and whatever,’ and the lawyer says, ‘I certainly think that the record supports the idea that the president in particular, has focused in on Haitians, but it’s broader than that. Haitians are our plaintiffs.’ But the relevant comparison, the relevant group here is all TPS countries all of which are non-white — and that makes its way into Justice Kagan’s dissent,” Rubin pointed out.
“The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not ‘overtly racial,’ but it is hard to know what that means,” , “Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.) The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any white community.”
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