By: Ian MillhiserJustice Editor, ThinkProgress.
Here’s a
pro tip for the lawyers at Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department: If you
want to defend the president’s efforts to lock people out of the nation
because of their religion, you might not want to rely on discredited
Supreme Court decisions enabling a racist backlash.
Palmer v. Thompson is one of the great missteps in the Supreme Court’s often unfortunate history
on matters of race. This case centered on the city of Jackson,
Mississippi’s operation of five racially segregated public swimming
pools. After a court ordered the pools integrated, the city closed the
pools rather than operating pools where people of all races could swim.
And the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 vote, let Jackson get away with this
scheme.
As a federal judge acknowledged in 1989, “the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Palmer, but it has all but done so.”
Nevertheless, the Trump administration cites Palmer favorably in a brief it filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which hears a challenge to Trump’s Muslim ban on Monday afternoon.
A central issue in that case, International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump,
is whether Donald Trump’s many, repeated statements that he intends to
ban Muslims from entering the United States show that he acted with an
unconstitutional motivation when he signed an order banning many Muslims
from entering the United States.
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