Donald Trump’s racist remarks could unravel his immigration policies in court
Lawyers could use his remarks about Haiti, El Salvador and African nations being ‘s***hole countries’ to prove that his immigration policies are based around prejudice, not security – and thus unconstitutional – experts say
For nearly a year now, a collection of lawyers challenging President Donald Trump’s travel ban and other immigration policies have argued, with considerable success, that the policies are driven not by legitimate national security concerns but by bigotry.
On Thursday, Trump once again made their arguments a little easier to prove. For these litigators, the president’s vulgarities are a gift and they do indeed keep on giving.
It’s almost as if he is throwing his own cases, albeit inadvertently.
His suggestion in an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers that the United States should stop accepting immigrants from “s***hole countries” is exactly the type of statement plaintiffs’ lawyers have cited as evidence, for example, of the president’s animus toward people from the Muslim-majority countries covered in the ban.
Such statements – be they tweets, quotes from news interviews or remarks from Trump’s surrogates – have been used effectively to show unconstitutional discriminatory intent.
One federal judge after another has agreed that Trump’s own words have undermined the Justice Department’s stated defences of his executive order, which is now in its third iteration.