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The U.S. also rolled back deportation protections for Afghan refugees this week.
Donald Trump won the presidency in part on promises to deport undocumented immigrants with criminal records. But his earliest executive orders—trying to undo birthright citizenship, suspending critical refugee programs—made clear he wants to attack legal immigrants, too. In our new series, Who Gets to Be American This Week?, we’ll track the Trump administration’s attempts to exclude an ever-growing number of people from the American experiment.
Upon entering the White House, President Donald Trump quickly shut the door on refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, and Venezuela. But this week, one group of refugees will be welcome: white South Africans. When asked to explain his logic here, Trump claimed there is no racism at play, and these South Africans “just happen to be white”—but it’s striking that he seems to be letting a white supremacist talking point shape his immigration policy.
And this week, multiple lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive order seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship will have their day at the Supreme Court, as oral arguments are scheduled for Thursday. Trump’s order attempted to single-handedly change the Constitution and how American citizenship has been conferred for centuries—but the high court will likely be considering a different question: whether district courts have the power to issue nationwide injunctions against the executive branch.
Here’s the immigration news we’re keeping an eye on this week:
White South Africans Deemed Refugees Arrived in the U.S.
Back in January, Trump axed the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program—but a few weeks later, he signed an executive order saying the U.S. would promote the resettlement of white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, who it has deemed refugees from “government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” This week, the first Afrikaners to qualify for this program arrived in Washington.
Afrikaners are largely the descendants of Dutch colonial settlers. They historically controlled South Africa’s major institutions until the 1990s, when the African National Congress pursued land reform to compensate nonwhite South Africans who had been kicked off their land under the apartheid regime. “The perceived persecution of the Afrikaners, who controlled South Africa’s major institutions until the end of apartheid, circulated as a white supremacist meme for decades,” Slate’s Molly Olmstead explains. “In the Trump era, it has been rehabilitated as a legitimate political grievance.”
In March, Trump proclaimed that “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with rapid pathway to Citizenship.” A few weeks later, Trump administration officials were in South Africa’s capital screening white citizens who could be eligible for U.S. refugee status, according to the New York Times. Their applications were processed within three months—unusually quick, as most refugees wait years, oftentimes in camps around the world, as they go through an extensive screening process.
Earlier this year, the State Department canceled the flights of approximately 10,000 refugees who had been screened, approved, and cleared to enter the U.S. These people had spent years working with USRAP to enter the U.S. lawfully, including thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. during its decades-long war in their home country.
Adding insult to injury, the Department of Homeland Security formally announced on Monday that it would be terminating temporary protected status for Afghan refugees currently living in the U.S., essentially allowing them to be deported back to Afghanistan. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS had determined that Afghanistan had an “improved security situation” and a stable economy now, making the country ineligible for TPS. Yet the State Department currently has a Level 4 travel advisory on Afghanistan, warning U.S. residents not to travel there due to “civil unrest, crime, terrorism, risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping and limited health facilities.”
South Africa’s government accused the Trump administration of taking in its white citizens as a political stunt, and disputed the president’s claim of discrimination against farmers of any particular race. The Episcopal Church also announced on Monday that it was ending a nearly four-decades-old relationship with the federal government under which it has offered refugee resettlement services because the administration’s recent moves go against the church’s “steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation.”
No More Deportations to Third Countries—For Real This Time
Last month, two unnamed Trump administration officials told the Washington Post that there are ongoing negotiations with as many as 30 foreign nations to take in America’s deportees who are not citizens of their country, including Costa Rica, Panama, and Rwanda.
And Reuters reported that the Trump administration was in talks with Libya to detain deportees from the U.S., as El Salvador has already been doing. But last week, a federal judge issued a blunt warning: Any immigrant deported without prior written notice and a meaningful chance to challenge their removal “would clearly violate this Court’s order.”
Back in March, a group of noncitizens from Central America filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security over its deportation of undocumented immigrants to third countries that are not their designated home country without first allowing them to prove their fear of persecution, torture, and even death in those third countries. In April, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction that blocked the Trump administration from deporting noncitizens to anywhere but their country of origin without due process. And in May, Murphy reiterated that the federal government still may not deport noncitizens to third countries unless they provide written notice in a language the noncitizen can understand and an opportunity to raise a fear-based claim against their removal.
Detained Pro-Palestinian Protestors Are Notching Wins in Court
Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested over a month ago near Tufts University over an op-ed she co-wrote alongside three other students that criticized the school’s response to the pro-Palestine movement on its campus. After being detained at a Louisiana facility for six weeks, over the weekend Ozturk was released and returned home to Massachusetts.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions ruled last Friday that Ozturk was being unlawfully detained, concluding that the federal government’s case has “no evidence here … absent the consideration of the op-ed,” which he said suggests a violation of her free speech rights. Sessions also found that Ozturk faced serious health risks in detention, where her chronic asthma worsened. She testified that she experienced at least eight asthma attacks over six weeks, whereas in the two or three years prior to her arrest, she had about nine.
The federal government initially requested that Ozturk be released with an ankle monitor, but Sessions ruled she was not a flight risk and could be released without one. A doctoral student from Turkey, Ozturk still faces the threat of deportation, as the federal government will continue to pursue its case against her. It’s arguing Ozturk’s presence threatens U.S. foreign policy interests, a claim it has raised in a slew of deportation cases it has brought against pro-Palestinian campus protestors.
Last week, a federal court ruled in favor of Georgetown University fellow Dr. Badar Khan Suri, deciding that his habeas case could be heard in Virginia, instead of Louisiana, where he’s been detained since March. Suri was teaching the class Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia, but DHS has accused him of spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism. About a week ago, another federal judge ruled that Mohsen Mahdawi—a Columbia University student who was ambushed by immigration agents when he was called in for a citizenship interview—must be released from immigration detention. Mahdawi was promptly freed from custody.
The Supreme Court Is Gearing Up for Birthright Citizenship Arguments
On Thursday, the high court will hear oral arguments over the president’s executive order that attempts to strip citizenship from children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants and holders of temporary visas. Numerous lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s policy as a plain violation of the 14th Amendment. And lower courts consistently ruled the order was blatantly unconstitutional and issued nationwide injunctions preventing the federal government from altering who gets to become American.
The Trump administration continued to escalate the cases and asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but the justices haven’t been asked to decide birthright citizenship on the merits. Instead, they will hear arguments over whether a lone district court judge should have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions at all, an issue that’s been hotly contested within the judiciary for years. The Trump administration is asking the justices to narrow the injunctions by limiting their scope to only the plaintiffs involved in the lawsuits.
Why is the DOJ going this route? “If I were the lawyer for the Department of Justice, arguing the merits doesn’t really convince five of the nine Supreme Court justices,” Brian Green, an immigration attorney based in Denver, told me back in March. Under the current citizenship clause, “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are eligible to become citizens. The Trump administration has fixated on the “jurisdiction thereof,” arguing that children of undocumented immigrants and temporary immigrants do not have an allegiance to the U.S. and therefore should not be afforded citizenship.
Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick that the government’s arguments take on a restrictive interpretation of birthright citizenship that “are not entirely coherent.”
“The word allegiance appears nowhere in the citizenship clause, but that’s what they say it means,” Frost explained. “The administration argues that this is what the Reconstruction Congress intended it to mean, and then they say that if you enter the U.S. illegally or overstay your visa because you violated our laws, you don’t have ;allegiance to the United States.’ ”
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