{"id":684144,"date":"2026-06-04T15:46:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T15:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/684144\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T15:46:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T15:46:07","slug":"the-supreme-courts-long-history-of-shaping-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/684144\/","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s long history of shaping race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race has played an important role in U.S. citizenship and immigration law since the earliest days of the nation\u2019s history. By categorizing people into distinct races, Congress and the courts have periodically decided who can acquire citizenship or be subjected to questioning about their right to live in the United States. Last month, Justice Samuel Alito illustrated race\u2019s continued role in immigration law during oral argument<\/a> in Mullin v. Doe<\/a>, a case about the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s authority to terminate Temporary Protected Status<\/a> for Haitian and Syrian nationals.<\/p>\n

While she was still secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem announced last year<\/a> that citizens of 13 countries, including Haiti<\/a> and Syria<\/a>, would lose TPS, a legal authority that allows certain migrants to live and work in the United States for humanitarian reasons. Geoffrey Pipoly, who represents Haitian TPS recipients, argued that the Trump administration\u2019s choice to terminate TPS protections racially discriminated against migrants of color, showing a \u201cbare dislike of Haitians in particular.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alito pushed Pipoly to clarify the boundaries of the racial classifications that he argued violate the due<\/a> process clause of the Constitution. \u201cDo you think that if you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks, and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a lineup, do you think you could say those people are \u2026 all non-white,\u201d Alito asked. \u201cHow about southern Italians,\u201d he added, in a reference to his own heritage<\/a>. After Pipoly responded by saying that \u201cour concept of these things evolves over time,\u201d Alito added, \u201c[y]ou have a really \u2026 broad definition of who\u2019s white and who\u2019s not white.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alito\u2019s main point was to express his distaste for racial line-drawing. \u201cI don\u2019t like dividing up the people of the world arbitrarily into three racial groups,\u201d he told Pipoly. But by presenting Pipoly with a series of hypotheticals seemingly intended to highlight the ambiguous boundaries of racial categories, Alito thrust the court into familiar territory in defining race. On multiple occasions, the court has addressed racial categorization\u2019s role in immigration law. In every instance, its decisions categorize people based on race or allow immigration law enforcement officers to do so.<\/p>\n

In a pair of cases decided roughly a century ago, the court created the judicial version of the lineup that Alito asked Pipoly to imagine. Takao Ozawa, a longtime resident of the United States, was not eligible for naturalization because, as \u201ca person of the Japanese race,\u201d he was not a \u201cwhite person,\u201d the court announced in 1922. Starting in 1790<\/a>, federal law limited citizenship through naturalization to \u201cfree white persons,\u201d adding people of African descent in 1870<\/a>. Ozawa urged the justices to interpret the law\u2019s text to exclude only Black people and Native Americans, as the legislators who voted on it would have. Instead, the court chose to rely on \u201cnumerous scientific authorities.\u201d In a unanimous opinion in Ozawa v. United States<\/a>, Justice George Sutherland wrote that \u201cthe words \u2018white person\u2019 were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three months later, the court adopted the opposite approach to racial categorization, but with a similar result. Bhagat Singh Thind, who was born in northwestern India, was also not a \u201cwhite person,\u201d Sutherland again declared for a unanimous court. Having taken the position a year earlier, in Ozawa<\/a>, that \u201cthe phrase \u2018white persons\u2019 and the word \u2018Caucasian\u2019 are synonymous,\u201d Sutherland turned to the fact that India\u2019s Punjab region, where Thind was born, was \u201cclassified by certain scientific authorities as of the Caucasian or Aryan race.\u201d <\/p>\n

Had it stayed true to the \u201cscientific\u201d approach used in Ozawa, the court would have concluded that Thind was white. But grouping an Indian alongside people \u201cfrom the British Isles and Northwestern Europe,\u201d or \u201cimmigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock,\u201d would astonish \u201cthe average well informed white American,\u201d Sutherland explained in United States v. Thind<\/a>. Instead of surprising white people, the court thus pivoted away from the \u201cscientific\u201d approach it adopted in Ozawa in favor of interpreting \u201cwhite\u201d according to the \u201cunderstanding of the common man.\u201d Using this method, it concluded that Thind was not white. He was therefore ineligible for U.S. citizenship.<\/p>\n

Congress removed the last racial eligibility requirement from naturalization laws in 1952<\/a>, but race-based assessments continue to have an important role in enforcing immigration law. In a pair of cases decided approximately 50 years ago, the court developed a legal doctrine for race-based policing of immigration law. In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce<\/a>, decided in 1975, the court allowed immigration officers to consider a person\u2019s \u201cMexican appearance\u201d when deciding who to stop for questioning. When deciding who looks Mexican, officers can consider a person\u2019s \u201cmode of dress and haircut,\u201d the court added. One year later, in United States v. Martinez-Fuerte<\/a>, the court announced that immigration officers could subject a person to in-depth, time-consuming questioning \u201clargely on the basis of apparent Mexican ancestry.\u201d Classifications based on physical characteristics are a hallmark of racial profiling.<\/p>\n

The court\u2019s immigration-law racial profiling doctrine remains relevant today. Last summer, a federal district court judge temporarily barred<\/a> immigration officers from considering a person\u2019s \u201c[a]pparent race or ethnicity\u201d when deciding who to stop and question in California. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined<\/a> the government\u2019s request to stay the district court\u2019s order, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The government\u2019s written request<\/a> to the court relies heavily on Brignoni-Ponce, arguing that the case permits immigration officers to consider \u201ca person\u2019s appearance,\u201d including \u201capparent race or ethnicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in a one paragraph order<\/a> issued last September in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo<\/a>, a majority of the justices agreed with the government\u2019s request to lift the district court\u2019s order prohibiting immigration officers from relying on a person\u2019s race or ethnicity. Although the majority did not provide its reasoning, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained his position in a 10-page concurring opinion that cited to Brignoni-Ponce nine times. Considering a person\u2019s apparent race or ethnicity (among other factors) when assessing potential violations of immigration law isn\u2019t just legally permissible; it is \u201ccommon sense,\u201d Kavanaugh explained. In his view, Brignoni-Ponce isn\u2019t limited to Mexicans. Instead, Brignoni-Ponce\u2019s acceptance of \u201capparent ethnicity\u201d allows officers to stop and question people who look like they \u201ccome from Mexico or Central America,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Eight months later, Alito seems to have forgotten what Kavanaugh knows well: the court has long permitted immigration officials to engage in racial profiling. And, every time, the result has hurt the interests of people who the court itself designates as not white. Instead of addressing whether the president\u2019s derogatory remarks about Haitians constitute impermissible racial discrimination, Alito prodded Pipoly to clarify racial boundaries that the court\u2019s own decisions have long treated as malleable and yet discernible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Race has played an important role in U.S. citizenship and immigration law since the earliest days of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":684145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-684144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=684144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/684145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=684144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=684144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=684144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}