Justice Elena Kagan put President Donald Trump's most racist and inflammatory remarks about Haitians into permanent record Thursday, blasting her conservative colleagues for refusing to "put them in print."
Supreme Court Rules on TPS
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to allow the Department of Homeland Security to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 350,000 migrants from Haiti and Syria, delivering a landmark win for the Trump administration.
In a blistering dissent in the Mullin v. Doe case, writing for the liberal minority, Kagan quoted Trump directly and noted remarks the conservative majority found too "repellent" to include.
Kagan's Dissent Quotes Trump
"The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print," Kagan wrote. Her dissent included when Trump said Haitians "probably have AIDS," called Haiti a "shithole" country, said Haitians are "poisoning the blood" of America, and described Haitian immigration as "like a death wish for our country."
Other statements resurfaced by Kagan included when Trump confirmed at a 2025 rally the remark he made during his first term, saying, "Why is it we only take people from shithole countries" like "Haiti [and] Somalia" and "Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?"
Majority Opinion Dismisses Racial Bias Claims
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that none of Trump's or former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's statements were "overtly racial" and that opposing TPS or describing difficult conditions in Haiti did not necessarily reflect racial bias. The opinion acknowledged Haiti's poor economic conditions directly, writing that "poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character," but the majority concluded the statements fell short of proving discriminatory intent.
"In offering the cited statements as proof that the termination of Haiti's TPS termination was motivated by race, Miot respondents seek to capitalize on the statements' heated language," Alito wrote, referring to Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, one of the lead plaintiffs.
Kagan's Direct Rebuttal
Kagan's dissent was a direct rebuttal to his assertion. Where the majority referred only vaguely to "cited statements," Kagan named them, printing the remarks plaintiffs had claimed as evidence of racial discrimination by the Trump administration that her colleagues had declined to put on the record. "One factor among many is enough when the factor is racial to presumptively establish an equal protection violation," Kagan wrote.
Kagan also cited Trump's baseless claims from 2024 that Haitians and Somalians in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets. The amplification of those rumors led to physical threats and disrupted daily life for thousands of immigrants.
"The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print," Kagan wrote. "The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President's resolve to remove Haitians from this country."
Kagan was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent.
