Dividing 6-to-3, the Court gave a narrow reading to a 1990 law that Congress passed to give temporary protection from being sent home to immigrants who came from countries torn by civil war, rampant violence, natural disasters or harsh living conditions.  The protection is intended to be temporary, but has often lasted for decades.

The Court’s new ruling declared that the courts cannot review any government decision to end that humanitarian protection or any of the steps leading up to withdrawing it.

Overall, the Trump Administration has moved to end protection under that law for about a million immigrants from 13 non-white nations.  Thursday’s ruling came in a case specifically involving more than 350,000 Haitians, who have had the protected status for 16 years, and more than 1,000 Syrians, protected for 14 years.  Haitians won the status after a severe earthquake in their home country; Syrians received it because of government repression under the regime of Bashar al-Assad..

The only nation with a majority White population whose immigrants in the U.S. have protected status is Ukraine, and that status is currently scheduled to expire on October 19.

While the new ruling does not mean prompt deportation for any immigrants, it does immediately strip them of their legal right to hold jobs in this country while they seek to stay in the U.S. legally, maybe by seeking asylum.  The new ruling did not determine their ultimate legal fate.

The decision revealed a sharp dispute between the majority of six Justices and the three dissenters over the question of whether President Trump and other Administration officials had violated the constitutional right of racial equality for the Haitians.  (The Syrians had not raised that issue as part of their attempt to keep protected status.)

The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., did not include the details of those statements but concluded that the comments were not “overtly racial” and could have been motivated instead by a general disapproval of the entire protected status program and how it had operated in the past.  The fact that this dispute involved the field of immigration control, Alito wrote, has an influence on how rigorously the Court judges “policy views” voiced by the President and other government officials.

The dissenting opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, quoted the challenged statements and called those by President Trump “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”  Among those that she listed were Trump’s comments that Haitians in Ohio were ‘’eating the dogs . . . eating the cats . . . they’re eating the pets of the people”; that Haitians in the U.S. “probably have AIDS”; that they came from a “shithole country”; and that allowing them into the U.S. was “like a death wish for our country.”

The dissenters remarked: “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.”

Kagan’s dissenting opinion was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor.  Alito’s opinion for the majority was supported in whole or in the most part by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.

Justice Thomas also wrote a separate opinion, speaking only for himself.  The most significant part of that opinion was an argument that the Constitution’s guarantee of racial equality does not apply at all to the actions of the federal government, but only to actions of the states, and it does not provide any promise of equality for non-citizen immigrants.

That is a narrow view that no other current Justice supports.  It also flatly contradicts a 1954 Supreme Court decision, Bolling v. Sharpe, that was decided on the same day as the famous school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.  The Bolling decision ended racial segregation in Washington, D.C., public schools.  (D.C. is not a state, so the Fourteenth Amendment mandate of racial equality—aimed at state governments—does not apply there. The Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment promise of “due process” includes a demand that federal policy, too, be race-neutral, and thus applicable to D.C. as a federal enclave.)

Even though Justice Thomas did not draw support on that point from any other Justice, the Court’s strongly conservative six-Justice majority continues to interpret narrowly the guarantees of racial equality in laws and the Constitution, notably in a controversial ruling in late April allowing state legislatures much broader power to re-draw congressional election districts to eliminate majorities of racial minority voters.

While only the Haitians raised in Thursday’s case the constitutional claim of illegal racism, both they and the Syrians sought to retain protected status by arguing that the Trump Administration had ended it without doing a fresh review of what the current conditions were in their home countries, which is explicitly required by the 1990 law.

While that law does bar the courts from reviewing a final decision to withdraw the protection, the challengers said the courts should at least have the power to rule on the legality of the process leading to such a decision.  However, the Court concluded that no part of the process is open to court review.

Although most actions of the federal government that cause harm to someone’s rights are open to challenge in federal courts, the Court has long held the view that immigration and control over who may enter the country or who may remain are so vital to the nation’s existence that the courts should give the other two branches of the federal government—the Executive and Congress—broad discretion to make policy in that field without being closely monitored by the courts.