(U.S. House of Representatives) – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Maxine Waters, CA-43, Ranking Member of the Committee on Financial Services, released the following statement in response to the Supreme Court granting the Trump administration’s request to revoke humanitarian parole from more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and order them out of the country.

Donald Trump is demonstrating the height of his racism as he works to remove 500,000 legal immigrants from this country. These are individuals who followed the legal process to apply for and receive humanitarian parole, which allows migrants from countries facing instability, including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, to enter the United States and live and work here legally, in this case for two years, provided they have a private sponsor. These people followed that process, entered the United States legally, and became law-abiding and contributing members of their communities. It is downright cruel for Trump to interfere with that process, take away their parole status with virtually no warning, uproot them from their families, sponsors and communities, and deport them to situations that are still unstable.

I am appalled that the Supreme Court is allowing Trump to proceed with these racist deportation plans targeting law-abiding, legal immigrants who are working, raising families and contributing in a positive way to their communities. I commend Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor for their dissent against this terrible decision.

Meanwhile, Trump lied to the American people and the world when he perpetuated a false narrative about White South Africans being subjected to genocide, and then used these lies to justify bringing White South Africans into the United States as refugees, while attempting to deport thousands of legal immigrants who are not White but who truly are refugees. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the United States intelligence community, and the international community have all confirmed that Trump lied about South Africa.

Co-president Elon Musk spread these outrageous lies. Musk is the same man whose family worked hard to maintain the racist apartheid system in South Africa for decades and who himself repeatedly gestured the Afrikaner salute – associated with white supremacist groups like South Africa’s neo-Nazi political party Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging.

But this isn’t new for Trump. Throughout his campaign and even after his election, Trump held rallies that featured racist and disparaging comments and outright lies about immigrants, especially Haitians, in an attempt to stoke fear amongst the American people. Trump’s baseless attacks caused irreparable harm to communities across our nation and further tarnished America’s image around the world.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters is in her 15th term representing the 43rd Congressional District of California in the U.S. House of Representatives. She also serves as Ranking Member of the Financial Services.