Justices Jackson, Sotomayor grill Trumps SCOTUS lawyer over shole countries jab in Syrian, Haitian migrant case

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s bashing of migrants from “s—hole countries” and other fiery immigration rhetoric came back to haunt him during the Supreme Court’s oral arguments Wednesday.While considering a case over the Trump administration’s bid to yank temporary protected status (TPS) for thousands of Syrian and Haitian migrants, Democrat-appointed justices latched onto his hot rhetoric to imply the White House was being racist.“Now we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy, dirty and disgusting s—hole country,'” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.

“I’m quoting him.”“He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America,” she went on.“I don’t see how that one statement is not … showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”Solicitor General John Sauer countered that Trump’s statements, when taken in context, were referencing non-racial issues such as poverty, crime, welfare, and drugs.

But fellow liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed unconvinced.“What about ‘Poisoning the blood‘ of Americans?” she asked.

“What about ‘bad genes?'”“So the position of the United States is that we have to have an actual racial epithet that we aren’t allowed to look at all the contexts to include the president’s insistence that immigrants from certain countries largely, if not almost exclusively, countries with African immigrants, black African immigrants, are not allowed,” she shot back.Trump, in a rally in 2025, said he didn’t want immigrants from “s—hole countries” and defended a “permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.”“Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark,” Trump said in Pennsylvania in Dece...