Megyn Kelly’s recent attack on Haitian immigrants highlights what legal experts, civil rights advocates, and dissenting Supreme Court justices describe as a broader, coordinated effort to dismantle humanitarian protections.
Last week, the Supreme Court decided to allow the Trump administration to bring a halt to protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants in the Mullin v. Doe case. As a result, an estimated 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian nationals will lose their legal right to work and face immediate deportation, uprooting families who have built lives in the U.S. for up to 16 years.
In response to the SCOTUS’ latest ruling, Kelly unleashed a racist tirade on her eponymous SiriusXM that she may have been holding on to for a long time.
“Go home. Get out. We know our country’s better than yours,” Kelly said during her Thursday show. “That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”
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“We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to f–king Haiti,” Kelly continued. “Sorry.”
As hundreds of thousands of families braced for the reality of mass deportation following the SCOTUS ruling, Kelly’s inflammatory commentary garnered instant backlash from political pundits from both sides of the aisle.
Steve Schmidt, a GOP strategist and a Trump critic, condemned Kelly’s statements during an appearance on The Jim Acosta Show.
“It’s quite a thing to watch this hate spewing out,” Schmidt said Friday. “And it’s quite a thing … this person was the host of presidential debates? And you see the sickness in her.”
For immigration advocates and media watchdogs, Kelly’s tirade represents something far more calculated than standard partisan punditry. Cultural critics point out that by utilizing her massive SiriusXM platform to explicitly link a legal, policy-based immigration status to a supposed threat against American “culture,” Kelly is effectively translating the administration’s hardline executive policies into an digestible cultural purity test for her audience.
To media analysts tracking the fallout of Mullin v. Doe, this rhetoric serves as a deliberate media blueprint—one designed to normalize xenophobia as mainstream patriotism and prep public sentiment for the realities of imminent mass deportations.
Charles Blow took offense to Kelly’s comment and blasted her blatantly racist, xenophobic rhetoric.
“This is what has been unleashed in this country: a return to emboldened racism. They feel validated and vindicated,” Blow wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “They no longer have to couch their bigotry in polite language. It can now, once again, be raw and visceral. This is what we are fighting for, people.”
Undoubtedly, Kelly’s rhetoric echoes President Donald Trump’s ideology when he shared that Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African nations were “sh*thole” countries in 2018. Since then, Haitian immigrants have remained in the Administration’s crosshairs.
When it comes to racist comments, this is not Kelly’s first rodeo. During her tenure at Fox News in 2013, she gained backlash after asserting that both Santa Claus and Jesus Christ were verifiably white.
In October 2018, she sparked another racial controversy while hosting Megyn Kelly Today on NBC, where she defended the use of blackface in Halloween costumes as long as it was linked to a specific character. Eventually, she issued an on-air apology claiming she had educated herself on the history of the racist practice. Just a few days later, NBC cancelled the daytime show.
