FILE PHOTO: Immigrants' rights activists and demonstrators attend a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court, as justices were scheduled to hear arguments on whether the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump can end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of Syrian and Haitian nationals, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 29, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard/File Photo
The headlines out of the Supreme Court came at us in waves Thursday morning, like a barrage of punches to the gut:
I wondered when the next headline might be, “Supreme Court Approves Name Change of United States to Trump States of America, because the country is entirely his now. The court majority has kowtowed entirely to a madman, transforming us into a nation not of immigrants but white Christian fascists determined to obliterate everything this country once stood for.
In one fell swoop, this corrupt Supreme Court made it extraordinarily difficult for immigrants to seek refuge on our shores; for foreign nationals who have fled to America due to war and natural disasters to remain here; for sane people to feel safe from crazy people with guns in public spaces; and for those who have been granted a death sentence through use of an herbicide to receive any financial relief for themselves and their families.
It's really kind of amazing how one purportedly intelligent group of lawmakers can get everything so wrong. But of course, it’s hardly an accident. It’s the Supreme Court majority’s agenda to deliver everything our lawless president seeks on a silver platter, in the process destroying decades, even centuries, of precedent and/or established law.
In blocking asylum seekers huddled at the border in particular, the court ruled to effectively abandon the desperate pursuing better lives, or even continued existence, period. It inspired Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, to invoke the memory of the voyage of the MS St. Louis that in 1939 was carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution during the Holocaust – and yet was denied docking in Cuba and the United States. It fated most of them to death and remains one of the darkest chapters in our history.
Sotomayor reasoned that Thursday’s ruling turning away migrants seeking asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border strands them and dooms many, if not most, to a similar fate. And of course, she’s right.
Essentially, the court majority hung its argument on an infuriating technicality – essentially, that their physical presence on Mexican soil meant that the asylum seekers had not yet “arrived” in the United States. But of course, that’s really the whole point. They weren’t here yet. They urgently sought to change that status by being on the doorstep of comparative freedom in their application for refuge.
But now, that door is being cruelly slammed shut in the faces of noncitizens looking to do the right thing via the application process rather than trying to sneak in. The conservative majority, unmoved in their heartlessness, said migrants stranded at the border do not “arrive” by “attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country.”
The fact that these people face such severe violence and extortion in their attempt to enter America was immaterial to the argument.
You know what this means, don’t you? Essentially, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty no longer applies. Here’s what it was:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Now it’s more like:
“Give me your skilled, your vetted, your Christian.
Those who qualify under our restrictive laws
Seeking opportunity through lawful paths we determine.
The door will remain locked until further notice.”
Concurrent to this brutal and unconscionable decision was the second one that gave Trump the green light to end temporary deportation protections for as many as 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians in the U.S. legally on work authorization visas. They and other Temporary Protected Status foreign nationals will now have to seek some other form of safeguard from being bounced out.
The big question in all of this is, of course, why. Why have we become a nation that no longer welcomes the immigrant and, in fact, does everything in its power to torment and prosecute those who are simply seeking better lives for themselves and their families? What is the point of having transformed ourselves from the Land of Opportunity to a police state inside of a decade?
The one thing it has nothing to do with is stamping out crime. The stats show that both documented and undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit violent, property, or drug offenses. To assert otherwise carries roughly the same credibility as claiming there’s significant voter fraud.
That means it’s all political. It serves the Republican cause to scare their voters into believing that the bad people from other countries are determined to hurt them and take their jobs and are mooching off a system they have no business sharing in.
Obviously, the Supreme Court has bought into this. But why? Why does it serve the MAGA morons and the upper reaches of the judiciary to want to keep the country flavorless and colorless and boring – determinedly English-speaking, Christian, uneducated.
And let’s say these people do want to come here seeking economic opportunity rather than protection from persecution. So what? Are they really going to drain and strain the system of a government that Republicans claim not to want any part of in the first place?
It’s just pure racism and hatred of “the other,” of course. And now it’s being validated by a Supreme Court majority twisting itself into a pretzel to attach their blatant discrimination to some kind of Constitutional standard.
Will the court go the extra mile and finally just do away with birthright citizenship altogether? It would shock many. But given the direction where this all seems to be heading, not me. How about you?
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)