Looking the plaintiffs in the eye
What happens when courts ignore human dignity? The recent cases of the Supreme Court tell us.
Our Case Library has hundreds of cases from countries all over the world in which courts use dignity as a framework for thinking through legal questions that affect people’s lives in particularly meaningful ways.
The US Supreme Court does not seem to care about the people whose lives are affected by their decisions and pays them no heed. The Court’s recent immigration decisions are a case in point. [1]
In one case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court held that immigration officers can turn away asylum seekers before they reach the border. The injustice is palpable: United States officials can take away their rights before they even have a chance to assert them.
In the other case, Mullin v. Doe (together with Trump v. Miot), the Court held that the Secretary of Homeland Security’s decision to end an immigration program called “Temporary Protective Status” was valid, even though she had failed to follow the statutory requirements and even though there was significant evidence that the decision was racially motivated, and even though it would mean that hundreds of thousands of people who have been living, loving, working, raising families, paying taxes, contributing to their communities, and so on were suddenly vulnerable to immediate deportation to Haiti and Syria – countries that continue to be unsafe.
In neither case do the judges in the majority show any concern or even interest in the lives of the people who are so profoundly affected by their decisions. They will go out to expensive dinners and celebrate.
But, as described by Justice Sotomayor in the asylum case, the lives of the people affected by the decision will take a different course:
The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not. More people will be forced to walk along the U. S.-Mexico border in dangerous conditions, trying to find a port that will inspect them. More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.
This concern aligns with how dignity-respecting judges in other countries decide cases. Even if they are unlikely ever to walk in the shoes of those affected by the law, they look at how women’s lives will change if abortion restrictions are upheld, at how the dignity of people is damaged when they are sentenced to life without parole and lose the hope that they will ever again rejoin society, they see how the dignity of voters is hampered when laws restricting their voting rights make people feel like second class citizens and distance them from the political community, they insist that government must treat all people with respect and concern for their dignity when they are in especially vulnerable situations. And when people are especially vulnerable – as immigrants and asylum seekers tend to be – courts will demand that governments take affirmative steps to protect their dignity, by enhancing access to services and by protecting access to courts to vindicate their rights. Dignity rights don’t depend on citizenship because dignity is inherent in every member of the human family: the dignity of all must be respected without exception or dilution.
The majority judges in these cases are so uninterested in how the law works in people’s lives that they don’t even recognize them as human beings. In the TPS case, the majority only once refers to them as people, and then in impersonal terms, as “seven Syrian nationals who benefit from TPS” and “a group of five Haitian nationals,” focusing on the fact that they are not American and that, having received a “benefit” from the United States, they are somehow less deserving of justice. Otherwise, it describes them only as “respondents” – as if their existence was reduced to the single fact of having been appealed against – or as “aliens” – an unfortunate term used only for space invaders and people who are in the United States without being citizens.
Justice Kagan seeks to correct this indignity by drawing attention to the plaintiffs as illustrative of how the law will be felt by hundreds of thousands of others.
Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot is a Haitian national who has held TPS for fifteen years. He lives in California where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer’s, a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization. … Miot believes his long-term residency in the United States would make him a prime target in Haiti for a kidnapping. Or consider Laila Doe, who fled Syria with her daughter in 2013 after her neighborhood was bombed. Today, Doe lives in Illinois where she works as a behavioral technician for individuals with disabilities and cares for her elderly mother, a U. S. citizen. Without TPS, she will have to leave her mother and return to a still ravaged, violent, and dangerous country. Doe fears that as a single woman living alone, she will be robbed or even killed there. And she is afraid that her now 17-year-old daughter, who has lived in this country almost all her life, will have no future in Syria because she speaks little Arabic.
It is not clear when deportations could begin. But the impact is already being felt. Due to uncertainty in the process, some people have already lost their jobs. Some are afraid to go to school or to church. Some people are making arrangements in case they are suddenly ripped from their families. The psychological and emotional toll is already tremendous.
By failing to consider even the named parties, the Court denies them the dignity of recognition – recognizing them as fellow human beings whose fates are linked to theirs, who have the same desires to live decent lives and care for their families as the justices or anyone else. It’s as if the justices know they’re hurting them and don’t have the courage to look them in the eyes.
[1] We consider Trump v. Barbara, a case about citizenship in another post. Ironically, some of the people whose citizenship is protected in that decision are the US-born children of TPS holders.