Samuel Alito Can Only Identify Bigotry When It Affects Him

Justice Samuel Alito said President Donald Trump’s remarks about excluding Haitians and Syrian immigrants were not “overtly racial,” calling the language “heated” and race-neutral in effect. But the same justice, in earlier opinions, identified anti-Catholic a

By the time Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion in Mullin v. Doe, the question wasn’t whether President Donald Trump’s immigration policy move would be debated in court. It was whether the Court would call the reasoning behind it what many critics said it was: bigotry.

Alito concluded that Trump’s comments—along with statements tied to former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem—did not amount to “overtly racial” statements. In the majority opinion. joined by the other five Republican-appointed justices. Alito dismissed the “very obvious evidence” of bigoted reasoning behind a policy change allowing President Donald Trump to cancel the temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrian immigrants as merely “heated language.”.

“None of the cited statements by either the President or [former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem] was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.

He added that political rhetoric has shifted—what would once have scandalized the public is now presented as ordinary language. “Trump’s and Noem’s comments merely reflected the fact that political rhetoric ‘by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago. ’” Alito wrote.

The sharpest contradiction, laid out in the account of Alito’s own judicial past, is how easily he identified prejudice when it intersected with Catholic immigrants and anti-Catholic animus.

Six years earlier, in a concurrence to the 2020 case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, Alito focused on a Montana provision that limited public funding for religious education. In that concurrence, he said the ban was rooted in anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment.

“Montana’s provision was modeled on the failed Blaine Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” Alito wrote. The Blaine Amendment, he said, sought to ban public funding for religious schools and was “prompted by virulent prejudice against immigrants, particularly Catholic immigrants.”

Alito described the prejudice as the kind that hides inside official language. He pointed to rhetoric that identified Catholics “not as citizens of the United States. but as ‘soldiers of the Church of Rome. ’ who ‘would attempt to subvert representative government. ’” and he tied it to anti-Catholic riots.

In that earlier context, Alito treated historical and cultural reference points as necessary to see what was actually being done. The same framing is credited to him in the discussion of the Mullin v. Doe majority: that “seemingly neutral” justifications could be constructed from “bigoted code language. ” and that the Court should look at the underlying meaning.

Alito’s Mullin v. Doe majority did the opposite with Trump’s and Noem’s words. The difference is where he draws the line between “heated language” and bigotry that courts should name.

In his Espinoza concurrence. Alito wrote about how a policy could be built on prejudice that doesn’t look like prejudice at first glance. He pointed to “a famous cartoon. published in Harper’s Weekly in 1871. ” depicting Catholic priests as crocodiles slithering toward American children while a public school crumbles. “The feelings of the day are perhaps best encapsulated by [a] famous cartoon,” Alito wrote, explaining why context mattered.

In the Mullin case, critics argued that the context of Trump’s remarks should have mattered in the same way. The account describes Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent as taking the opposite approach—insisting that Alito’s dismissal of Trump’s statements as not “overtly racial” was inconsistent with how the Court ought to treat inflammatory language.

Kagan pointed to what Trump had said about Haitians and other immigrants, describing the statements as “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print,” before listing quoted remarks.

The dissent quoted Trump saying: “Haitians are eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield. Ohio].” It also quoted him saying Haitians were eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” Kagan’s dissent further cited Trump’s claim that Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS. ” calling Haiti “a ‘shithole country. ’ which is ‘filthy. dirty. [and] disgusting.’”.

Kagan also quoted Trump saying Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country,” and that he asked, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?”

Kagan’s dissent then tied those remarks to a phrase echoed in the majority debate: “Haitians, along with some others, [are] ‘poisoning the blood’ of our country.”

The broader point drawn from these competing approaches is personal for Alito. too—at least in the way the account presents it. Alito is described as the son of a Catholic Italian immigrant. That family history is used to underline what the narrative argues is Alito’s selective willingness to recognize prejudice.

In the Espinoza concurrence, Alito identified anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment behind Montana’s funding limits. In Mullin v. Doe, he treated Trump’s remarks about Haitians and the broader immigration change as something else—“heated language” rather than “overtly racial” speech.

The argument presented is that the line Alito drew is not neutral at all. It portrays Trump’s language as part of a long pattern of xenophobic attacks directed at unwanted groups, including Italians, Irish, Jewish, Slavic, and other immigrants arriving in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

And it suggests something harsher about the Court’s majority: when the language is aimed at groups tied to Alito’s own identity and family history. he can identify “bigoted code language.” When it is aimed at others—Haitians and Syrian immigrants—the account says the Court covers its ears and declines to name the motive plainly.

The sequence of decisions—Alito’s willingness to call anti-Catholic hostility “bigoted code language” in Espinoza. and his refusal to label Trump’s remarks in Mullin as “overtly racial”—creates a tension that can’t be dismissed as mere difference in facts. It is the same jurist applying two different thresholds for when prejudice should be visible to the Court and when it should be folded into race-neutral framing.

For immigrants and for Americans watching how the highest court reads political speech, that threshold doesn’t just decide a legal outcome. It determines whether language that dehumanizes people is treated as ordinary rhetoric—or as evidence of the motive behind policy.

Samuel Alito Mullin v. Doe Kristi Noem temporary protected status Trump immigration policy Haitians Syrian immigrants Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue Blaine Amendment Elena Kagan dissent