"One of the most horrific maybe aspects of the Supreme Court decision, in addition to the substance of it itself, is the language that Justice Alito used, where he dismissed all of the racism that has surrounded immigrants, saying these are reasonable policy declarations." -- Heba Gowayed.
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FEATURING HEBA GOWAYED - The US Supreme Court on Tuesday June 30th handed down a rare defeat for President Donald Trump by upholding the birthright citizenship assertion of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment. But just a week earlier, two shattering rulings upended long-standing immigration pathways.
In back-to-back 6-3 rulings on the same day, conservative justices upheld the practice of turning away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. And, they affirmed Trump’s desire to overturn the Temporary Protected Status of 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians residing in the US.
Heba Gowayed is a writer and associate professor of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center. She is author of the award-winning book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential and wrote a piece in The Guardian Newspaper about the Supreme Court immigration rulings. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the impact of the rulings.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I have to say, I honestly was kind of bracing myself for the Supreme Court to overturn birthright citizenship, just given how much it has affirmed the Trump administration's agenda, going as far as to focus on semantics, bending over backwards to rewrite Trump's own intention behind his words, et cetera.
Let's talk about the TPS specific ruling. TPS, I understand, was basically a designation that was created to protect people who wouldn't necessarily be eligible for asylum. Is that right?
Heba Gowayed: Right. So, unfortunately, what we saw today in terms of birthright, just briefly, is something that should have never, ever gotten to the Supreme Court. The Constitution is quite clear on what birthright citizenship is, what it entails, and it is really a foundational building block for what this country is, which is a country of immigrants.
And that brings us to the tragedy that is this TPS case, which is that asylum law, by definition, is very narrow. So, the only people who qualify for asylum, and that's not just in the United States, but globally, as per the United Nations definition, which is adopted by these states, is for people who are fleeing persecution on the basis of race, on the basis of identity, on the basis of tribe.
