Thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump is poised to betray a community he vowed to ‘champion’

Around this time 10 years ago, when Florida was still seen as a competitive battleground state, Donald Trump campaigned in Miami and spent some time at the Little Haiti Cultural Center, stressing the “common values” he shared with Haitian Americans.

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“Whether you vote for me or not,” the then-candidate said at the time, “I really want to be your biggest champion.”

A year later, he scrapped temporary status protection for Haitians who were allowed entry to the U.S. following a devastating earthquake in 2010.

A year after that, the Republican hosted a White House meeting and referred to Haiti as a “s—hole” country.

Six years after that, Trump based part of his 2024 presidential campaign on racist and false claims about Haitians in Ohio eating household pets.

And two years after that, a full decade after he stressed the “common values” he shared with Haitian Americans and vowed to be the community’s “biggest champion,” the Republican took steps to eliminate temporary status protection for hundreds of thousands of Haitians currently living legally in the United States.

The move sparked a court fight, culminating in a predictable ruling from the high court’s conservative majority. MS NOW’s Jordan Rubin explained:

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority sided with the Trump administration over Haitians and Syrians on Thursday in a ruling on the administration’s attempt to end humanitarian safeguards under the Temporary Protected Status program.

Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program. For this case, the majority said that means Haitians and Syrians aren’t entitled to orders keeping their protections in place while their litigation proceeds, even though lower courts found serious legal problems with the administration’s attempt to end their protections.

Writing for the three-member minority, Justice Elena Kagan explained that without such postponement, “hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians living in this country will lose their legal status and work authorization” and that most of them “will have no legal option except to leave the country, even at the price of leaving family behind.”