SCOTUS’s immigration decisions prove cruelty is still the point

In accepting the Republican nomination for president in 2000, George W. Bush advocated for a political ideology he called “compassionate conservatism.” Reflecting on his message 18 years later, he said, “I felt compelled to phrase it this way because people hear ‘conservative’ and they think heartless. And my belief then and now is that the right conservative philosophies are compassionate and help people. Compassionate means you care about people and the policies you enunciate help people . . . It’s a simple political principle that good policy makes good politics, but good politics comes out of policies that affect people in a positive way.”

Twenty-six years after his election as president, Bush’s compassionate conservatism is dead at the hands of Donald Trump. The president and his MAGA Republicans didn’t just bury the political corpse, they dug it up out of the ground and killed it repeatedly.

The most recent example came on Thursday when, in a series of three rulings, the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court endorsed de facto ethnic cleansing.

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court ruled that asylum seekers can be turned away at the U.S. border because they have not yet physically entered the country. As others have observed, this is like a bully blocking a door and daring you to push him aside. The clear intent of Congress, as established in the Refugee Act of 1980, is that there is a process for refugees to apply for help once they have gotten to the United States. That has been rendered moot.

The Court decided in Blanche v. Lau that immigration officers can now deport and deny lawful permanent residents — green card holders — entry into the country if they reasonably believe that the residents have committed a crime involving “moral turpitude.” This vague and archaic language has handed the federal government a massive blank check to put permanent residents in “immigration limbo.”

Mullin v. Doe is the worst of this trio of immigration rulings, ending Temporary Protected Status for an estimated 330,000 Haitians, 6,000 Syrians and potentially more than one million other immigrants who are in the United States under the auspices of that program. Created in 1990, T.P.S. protects immigrants who are unable to return to their home countries because of violence, natural disasters or other great danger.

People who have temporary protected status are not the “illegal aliens” or “criminal aliens” that the Trump administration and the right-wing are so obsessed with; they have obeyed the law and done things, as conservatives like to say, the “right way.” Holders of T.P.S. status are not “takers” or “leeches.” They contribute billions of dollars to the American economy.

This is not an exercise in abstract legal theory. Doctors who provide life-saving care in their communities will be forced to leave the country. Scientists will have to stop their research. Parents will be taken away from their children who were born in the United States. Businesses will be forced to close. Thriving communities will be hollowed out. Many will be sent back to war zones and countries devastated by natural disasters. People fleeing persecution because of their political beliefs, gender or sexuality, and how they pray will face certain peril.

In her dissent in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, invoked the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, including the case of MS St. Louis. In 1939, the German ocean liner, which was carrying Jewish refugees, was turned away by the United States. The ship was forced to return to Europe, and almost all of its passengers were later murdered by the Nazis.

“Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet if the refugees on the MS St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U.S. soil.”

In politics, there are many ways to hurt — or help — hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of people. On Thursday, the unelected — and unaccountable — conservative Supreme Court majority chose to do so with brutality, dressed up in cold judicial language.

In her dissent, Sotomayor warned, “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” 

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Taken together, these rulings serve the Trump administration’s campaign to end multiracial pluralistic democracy and to create — or recreate — a White Christian Nation.

Federal judges have warned that T.P.S. terminations appear to be motivated by the Trump administration’s racism and racial animus, and the evidence suggests this is clearly the case. Katherine Polk, a federal district judge who presided over the challenge to T.P.S. for Syria, noted that all the terminations of “have involved non-European, majority nonwhite populations.” Federal District Judge Ana C. Reyes reached a similar conclusion about the termination of T.P.S. for Haiti, holding that it was “substantially likely” that “hostility to nonwhite immigrants” is motivating the administration’s decision.

But the Trump administration is not entirely without compassion. 

Under the direction of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s direction — and the influence of Elon Musk — the United States is now welcoming thousands of white South Africans who are claiming refugee status because they are being “persecuted” by the Black majority. This is a conspiracy theory.

More than 30 years after the end of Apartheid, the white minority, which accounts for approximately 7% of the total population, still controls the vast majority —more than 70% — of the country’s wealth and farmland. Columnist John Casey summarized it this way: “So if you are a white farmer from South Africa, this country rolls out the red carpet. If you are a Black Haitian who survived a devastating earthquake and gang violence and built a life here for 15 years, you get a deportation notice, and a big F-U by the United States of America.”

To make matters worse, the Trump administration has suspended all refugee resettlement programs except for white South Africans. According to the New York Times, the Trump administration is preparing welcome packages for white South African “refugees.” Included in these are an American flag, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and a Trump-approved report that minimizes the role of slavery in America’s founding. There is also a children’s book arguing that white people are victims of South Africa’s Black government.

Ultimately, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans, and now the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, are giving right-wing voters and the public what they want: cruelty made into public policy.

For example, the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey shows that only about 50% of white Christians believe that “immigrants should have access to basic rights — including due process.” A majority (57%) of white evangelicals don’t believe immigrants deserve basic rights. On immigration, race and civil rights, Trump and his agents were honest and direct about the cruelty they would unleash if they took back the White House.

On July 4, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. One of our foundational civic myths is that we are a shining city on the hill, a nation of immigrants guided by the Statue of Liberty’s plea to “Give me your tired, your poor; Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Like other national myths, this is all a mix of lies, truths and distortions of reality — and ideals and aspirations.

They have embraced some of the worst aspects of the nation’s character and story — the nativism, xenophobia, racism and bigotry — as they imagine an America locked in a civilizational struggle between the White and non-white world.

This is not a clash of civilizations. It is a nation choosing to crash by convincing itself that compassion is weakness. Truly great nations do not make these decisions.

Whatever one thinks of its sincerity, compassionate conservatism was smothered, basically stillborn, because the Republican Party chose nationalism, culture war issues, fake populism, and the border and immigration as its defining issues. This grew into MAGA and Trumpism. A different choice in that great and underappreciated “what if?” could have stopped this nightmare.