Alito rips race-based claim in high-stakes migrant protections case at Supreme Court

By Fox News · Fox News

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito pushed back on claims this week that ending deportation protections for Haitian migrants was racially motivated, pressing an attorney to explain how that argument works when the policy has been applied broadly to migrants from many countries. "You have a really large — you have a really broad definition of who’s White and who’s not White," Alito, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, said during oral arguments, challenging a claim leveled by the migrants’ lawyer that the Trump Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intentionally targeted non-White migrants when it decided to terminate their temporary protected status (TPS). The exchange came as the Supreme Court weighed a high-stakes case over the Trump administration's authority to end TPS protections for tens of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants. The high court's decision could strip their legal protections and have similar implications for hundreds of thousands of other migrants, meaning DHS could then move to detain and deport them. TRUMP FOES MELT DOWN THAT SCOTUS IS UNLEASHING 'RACIAL TERROR' ON US WITH ICE RAID RULING Congress created temporary protected status as a form of protection for migrants fleeing war and natural disaster, and the law requires DHS officials to periodically review whether an origin country qualifies under those terms. Attorney Geoffrey Pipoly, representing migrants during oral arguments, argued the courts had some authority to review DHS' temporary protected status decisions and that the government's decision to end the protected status for Haitians, in particular, did not follow the law because it was driven by racial bias against "non-White immigrants." "The president has disparaged Haitian TPS holders specifically as undesirables from a 's---hole country,' and days after falsely accusing them of 'eating the dogs and eating the cats of Americans,' he vowed that he would terminate Haiti's TPS, and that is exactly what happened," Pip…