Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested during oral arguments on Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may have discriminated against Haitian migrants by ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the United States because President Donald Trump once called Haiti a “shithole country.”
Sotomayor’s suggestion came during oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court in the cases Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot where left-wing groups have sued the Trump administration after DHS announced last year that TPS would end for hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants and thousands of Syrian migrants.
While debating Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the Trump administration in the case, Sotomayor brought up the president’s former comments in which he called Haiti a “shithole country.”
“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, where he declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as ‘poisoning the blood of America,’” Sotomayor said.
“I don’t see how that one statement is not a prime example of the Arlington example at work and showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision,” she continued.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson followed up Sotomayor’s comments by citing Trump’s prior comments about illegal aliens who go on to commit murder where the president said such illegals have “bad genes.”
“How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” Trump said in 2024 during a radio show. “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.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com.