On Thursday, June 25, the Supreme Court ruled to enable the Trump regime to immediately withdraw Temporary Protected Status from over 300,000 immigrants from Haiti and 7,000 from Syria. Temporary Protected Status is extended to immigrants from countries in which their very ability to survive is threatened by either natural disaster or political violence.

These refugees are allowed to stay in the U.S. until an investigative process has determined that they can return home safely. The fascist Supreme Court overturned that legal process and said that the TPS protection for these refugees is now removed. This is a criminal and fascist outrage for everyone affected.

Here we will focus on the 300,000 Haitians—many of whom will face unbelievable hardship and even death if deported.

Why did the Haitians receive TPS? The immediate causes were the devastation from a catastrophic earthquake in 2010 and deadly political violence from gangs. The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has posed the deeper question and answer:

"Why do people come here from all over the world? Because the U.S. has messed up the rest of the world even worse than what they have done here!” 

The Supreme Court decision is a tremendous blow to the Haitians now protected by TPS, but it is hardly the first blow visited upon Haitians by the U.S. The U.S. has despised Haiti since Haitians launched the first and only recorded successful slave revolution, against their French colonial masters beginning in 1791. The U.S. and the European powers pursued a policy of isolation, looting and domination of Haiti’s successive governments virtually from day one. In the 20th century, the U.S. began to directly dominate Haiti. This included the U.S. seizure of all of Haiti’s gold reserves which amounted to approximately $500,000. The U.S. transferred these directly to what became Citibank in December 1914! The U.S. Marines then invaded Haiti in the summer of 1915. The brutal U.S. military occupation lasted nearly 20 years and featured the bloody suppression of armed peasant resistance. After World War II, the U.S. installed the notoriously repressive and corrupt Duvalier family for 30 years, known as the Tontons Macoute regimes. After a rebellion against Duvalier and the Macoutes in 1986 and a series of contested elections and “instability,” the U.S. engineered the kidnapping of Haiti’s lawfully elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, and installed a government that was much more pliant to U.S. dictate. Through these decades Haitian agriculture was decimated by various plans and programs developed within the U.S.¹

TPS was granted to Haitians after an earthquake in 2010 that killed over a quarter of a million people and totally decimated the Haitian infrastructure (water and sanitation, health care, schools, etc.). After a series of coups and counter-coups, Haiti itself is in a situation in which heavily armed urban gangs rule the streets, and extortion, rape, murder, and all-round horror run rampant. 

Make no mistake: if Haiti today is a horror show, it is one made in the USA.  

The Supreme Court Turns a Blind Eye to Trump’s Racism

For at least ten years Trump has repeatedly spoken of Haiti and Haitians in the vilest possible terms. In the 2024 presidential debates, Trump fabricated a claim that Haitians in the small city of Springfield, Ohio were eating the cats and dogs of “the people that live there.” J.D. Vance repeated the lie and then when it was exposed as a total fabrication by the native-born people in Springfield who were supporting their Haitian neighbors, Vance then justified this poisonous bullshit by saying “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.” Trump has repeatedly said for over ten years that Haitians are “poisoning the blood of the American people,” that they are “bringing AIDS into America,” that they come from a “shithole country,” and all the other familiarly and endlessly repeated ugly racist slanders. Yet Judge Samuel—“see no racism, hear no racism, speak no racism”—Alito and his blank-faced Republi-fascist executioners on the Supreme Court bench shrug off accusations of racism without even bothering to acknowledge any of these self-damning quotes from Trump!

The fascist commentator Megyn Kelly immediately said the quiet part out loud, at the top of her voice: 

Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic, culture, and values. You being here only dilutes it for us… GO BACK TO FUCKING HAITI!

“Work ethic,” our ass, Kelly! The only thing you “fill [the country] with” are lies that turn reality upside down in a vain attempt to justify your lives lived on the backs of the people of the world you so contemptuously consign to destruction!

In addition to a Supreme Court term distinguished in large part by overt racism barely concealed behind bland denials—see our recent coverage of the vicious attacks on the voting rights of Black people—this decision continues a string of taking power from the lower courts and handing it over to the fascist regime. Despite ruling against Trump in certain high-profile cases, over and over again the Supreme Court has mostly given Trump the power to nullify lower-court rulings against him, as it did in this case. We will cover this in more depth in future issues. 

All The Democrats Can Offer Is a Dead-End Trap

Meanwhile, the Democrats deplore the decision, make stern faces, and vow to elect more of their candidates in November as their answer. Leaving aside the obvious and rapidly-moving plans being set in place by Trump to fix and/or overturn those elections—including the fascist disfranchisement of Black voters—this is bullshit. As Bob Avakian has pointed out,² when the Democrats had a large majority in Congress and had the chance to expand the number of judges on the court, they refused.

Why this is so—how this is to be understood—is an extremely serious question demanding an extremely serious answer. In that light, and with that spirit, we urge you to turn to the important new article on this site from the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, “Why There Is ‘No Lincoln’ Now, and What That Has to Do With the Possibility of Emancipation, FASCISM, PROFOUND CRISIS AND THE FUNDAMENTAL REVOLUTIONARY SOLUTION.”