Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is earning widespread acclaim on the right for a blunt, tightly argued line in his concurring opinion in a major immigration ruling that handed a decisive victory to the Trump Administration.
According to Gateway Pundit, the Supreme Court ruled 63 on Thursday that the Trump Administration may terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from Haiti and Syria. The Courts three liberal members, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, while Justice Samuel Alito authored the majority opinion.
Under the decision, the Trump Administration is now set to revoke TPS protections from approximately 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who had been allowed to remain in the United States under what was billed as an emergency, temporary program. Earlier this year, a federal judge had attempted to block the Department of Homeland Security from ending TPS for the 350,000 Haitians, underscoring how aggressively the lower courts have tried to thwart President Trumps immigration agenda.
Justice Thomas joined the five other right-leaning justices but filed a separate concurrence that went directly to the constitutional heart of the case and the limits of foreign nationals claims against the federal government. His reasoning, which many conservatives see as a needed corrective to years of activist rulings, dismantled the migrants legal theory at its core.
This can all be summed up with this sentence he wrote: Even assuming jurisdiction, the equal protection claim fails for the additional reason that aliens have no equal protection rights against the federal government. For constitutional originalists, that single passage reflects the Framers intent that the federal governments first duty is to its own citizens, not to those merely present within its borders.
This is the only appropriate constitutional interpretation since our founders sought to protect AMERICAN citizens, not foreign aliens. As one would expect, Thomas won universal praise from conservatives on social media, who hailed his opinion as a clear reaffirmation of national sovereignty and the rule of law.
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