Trump finds partner in supreme court in his war against immigration

A rally in New York on the day of the supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to strip TPS protections from Haitians and Syrians. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters View image in fullscreen A rally in New York on the day of the supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to strip TPS protections from Haitians and Syrians. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters Analysis Trump finds partner in supreme court in his war against immigration Maanvi Singh Recent rulings have bolstered president’s pitiless campaign against people of colour fleeing violence and disaster In the US supreme court, it seems Donald Trump has found loyalists in his crusade against immigration and immigrants. In a pair of rulings Thursday, the court allowed the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections that have granted people from Haiti and Syria the right to live and work legally in the US for more than a decade, and cleared way for the government to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border by physically blocking them from setting foot on US soil. And on Tuesday, the court granted border officials broad discretion to deport lawful permanent residents or green card holders. In each of these cases, a 6-3 conservative majority on the highest US court offered the administration broad powers to circumvent or selectively administer immigration law – as it sees fit. Supreme court conservatives accused of advancing ‘white-supremacist agenda’ Read more More broadly, this week’s decisions are among dozens of new administration policies that seek to radically restrict or remove immigrants of colour, and redefine who has a chance to live in the US and consider themselves American. Still looming is the court’s decision on whether Trump can deny birthright citizenship to thousands of people born in the US to parents of temporary visitors and undocumented immigrants. In the ruling allowing the administration to end temporary protected status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands people, the supreme court signalled that it is unwilling to grapple with the racist and nativist philosophy fueling Trump’s immigration policies. This is how, on the same day that Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Trump’s repeated assertions that Haiti was a “shithole country” and that Haitians were “poisoning the blood” of this country did not prove this policies were “overtly racial”, Trump officials began to repeat these same racist tropes. On Fox News , Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide and the architect of the president’s hardline immigration policies, spoke broadly against admitting migrants from “nations that have never had contact with the west, would have never developed the combustion engine or airplanes or televisions or radio or the internet”. Miller has made clear that the administration is aiming for a return to the nativist 1920s, when the US barred entry for people from much of the world and brought net immigration down to zero. To enact its agenda, the administration