Trump 'preference' for 'white people' costs him in blistering court ruling

A federal judge blocked part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, citing the president's own "preference" for white immigrants.

U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio issued the ruling Monday, blocking three U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policies that had frozen green card and work permit applications for people from seven countries.

"This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people," Marbley wrote. "Aside from a stated desire for more Scandinavian immigration, President Trump has sought to welcome white South Africans."

From October 2025 through May 2026, the ruling notes, 6,665 of the 6,668 refugees admitted to the U.S. were from South Africa.

At a December 2025 rally in Pennsylvania, Trump asked: "Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?... Send us some nice people."

"In sum, both the President and the Vice President have publicly and repeatedly expressed outright hostility toward immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election," the judge wrote, finding the pattern impossible to ignore.

"Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia," he added.

Trump has claimed that white South African farmers face a "genocide" and made their plight a priority. "Farmers are being killed," he told PBS in May 2025. "They happen to be white."

The administration has since proposed raising the U.S. refugee cap to 17,500 — with the additional 10,000 slots reserved exclusively for white Afrikaners.

"We are processing resettlement cases for white Afrikaners at a record pace," Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told Democracy Now!. "This program has never been a fast program, and it's being expedited for just this one population."

Marbley also cited Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's dissent in a recent immigration case, calling Trump's statements about certain countries "repellent and racially inflected" — including his claim that immigrants from those nations are "poisoning the blood" of the United States.

The ruling is the 11th of its kind. At the hearing, the government told the judge it expected to lose — and spent its argument focused only on how narrow the remedy should be.