MS NOW guest and immigration attorney Allen Orr warned on air on Thursday that a Supreme Court decision handed down just hours earlier could mean Americans “die and suffer.” Orr weighed in on the ruling in favor of the Trump administration, which allowed for the president to unilaterally end the Temporary Protection Status program for migrants from countries he sees fit.

MS Now legal affairs reporter Fallon Gallagher began the segment with a rundown of the news.

Gallagher noted that the “6-3 ruling along ideological lines. Alito wrote the majority; Kagan wrote the dissent.”

“And basically what they’re saying here is that there is no judicial review for the terminations of non-constitutional claims. Now, that means that the court actually can’t decide — there’s no role for the court to decide if the Trump administration can terminate these types of claims or not,” she explained, adding:

But there was one constitutional claim in this case. These TPS recipients argued that the Trump administration was trying to terminate the programs on racial grounds. They pointed to statements that the president had made about Haitians, and that then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had made. The court is saying that because the Trump administration has reviewed every single termination that has come up thus far, there is no racial ground.

But I want to read very briefly from this ruling, because Justice Alito writes in the majority: “Viewing all relevant evidence, we conclude that [the] respondents are unlikely to prove that race was a motivating factor in the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation. It follows that they are not entitled to interim relief on their equal protection claim.”

Now, of course, they’re pointing to those statements — those racially motivated statements that the president had made about Haitians in Ohio. You’ll remember that whole saga about “eating pets.” They’re saying that doesn’t count here, because there is no clear racial motivation by the Trump administration.

But again, this is a major, major blow to those TPS recipients from Haiti and Syria. There are more than 350,000 of those people here. But there are more than one million people here on TPS status overall. So this is going to have massive implications. Antonia?

Anchor Antonia Hylton then turned to Orr, asking, “Allen, I want your reaction to what Fallon just laid out for us there, and the concept here that the court is ignoring the history of this administration’s remarks about Haitian people in particular. I don’t think there’s a single American who can say they actually forget what we heard from the president, what we heard from Vice President Vance about Haitian people — just some of the most disgusting and racist remarks you can imagine. I know you work with a number of Haitian clients. Break down for me just how devastating all of this is about to be.”

“Very devastating. And I hope we stop talking about it as ‘the Trump administration won’ or ‘someone won,’ because right now, America lost,” Orr replied, adding:

There are going to be a lot of jobs that are left open, and a lot of people in the home health care industry who are not going to receive any service, because their providers are going to be removed from the United States. There are a lot of people who are going to die and suffer because of this. So I wish this court was more of a court of equity rather than what they say they were — a court of policy.

I am the chair of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, which is the U.S. organization that represents these Haitians before the Supreme Court. We’ve made the argument that it’s not just his comments, but also the writings — and just recently, the discovered emails from Kristi Noem — about the clear conversations they’ve had about Haitians and Black immigrants in general, when you even look at the refugee policy. And this court has said, even with that information, there’s nothing for us to do here, which seems extremely problematic along party lines.

Today you’ve seen something I haven’t seen in the Supreme Court in a very long time: justices reading dissents — 35 pages — from the bench. So even in the Supreme Court, you don’t see the harmony that generally exists there in a peaceful dissent; you see them saying this is outside the norm. And it is outside the norm, because this isn’t just about policy and procedure — this is about people and human lives.

And the concept that people keep repeating — that the problem is it’s “temporary” status and it’s been longer than temporary — well, change the word. Don’t put people’s lives in danger because you feel that label arbitrarily extends something. As I said before, there are a million-plus TPS individuals who are here legally, working. They’re authorized, they’ve been vetted. There are none of the other concerns you might have with people who come in undocumented. They’re supporting our economy. And when you remove those individuals, you draw down all of those workforces — all those jobs they’re doing, all of these companies that were relying on these TPS workers to work tomorrow are going to have to make decisions about them leaving today.

So this is not a big win that we’re going to celebrate. There are 350 million-plus Americans in the United States — a million TPS holders are not causing some economic burden on the United States.

Watch the clip above via MS NOW.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!