Looming over Supreme Court arguments Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s efforts to end temporary immigration protections for Haitians is the question of how unsafe conditions are in Haiti, which has long suffered from violence and natural disasters.
One of the justices may have personal insight into that question.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her husband, Jesse, decided to adopt a child internationally in part because, as Barrett later recounted, “There were so many children in need.”
They settled on Haiti.
Vivian, then 14 months old, became Barrett’s second child around 2005. John Peter, flown out of Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake, became her fourth oldest. Barrett’s other kids — she has seven in all — are her biological children.
Now Barrett will join her fellow justices in deciding whether the Trump administration can remove temporary immigration protections for 353,000 Haitian migrants, all given temporary status because of the earthquake and its aftermath. The court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday.
“Haiti is, you know, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere,” she said in a February 2019 talk at Notre Dame Law School. “And it’s close enough to the United States that we could go as a family and be involved in Haiti as the children got older. So we chose Haiti.”
It can be risky to predict a justice’s views of a case based on their life experiences. But some legal scholars argue that the role of justices’ lived experience is often given too little weight by court watchers.
“She’s a human being, and it’s hard to imagine it not spilling over in some fashion,” said Neal Devins, a professor at William & Mary Law School who has researched the behavior of Supreme Court justices. At the same time, he said, Barrett’s connection to Haiti is likely to be just one of an array of factors playing into her thinking, including her allegiance to originalist legal interpretation and the conservative legal tradition from which she comes.
There are major differences in how Barrett’s children and the Haitian migrants covered by TPS entered the United States, and the laws governing international adoptions and TPS do not intersect. Barrett’s children, unlike the Haitian temporary protected status holders, are U.S. citizens.
But Barrett’s adoption of children from Haiti could play into how she approaches the case, according to academics who have studied Supreme Court justice behavior. The adoption process is long and painstaking, requiring bonding visits with children in their home countries, according to experts on international adoptions. They say adoptive parents typically build a strong connection with their child’s native country.
“I think she wants her legacy to be one of being a law-oriented justice,” said Devins, who knew Barrett when she was a professor at Notre Dame Law School. That said, he added, “she may appreciate this case differently.”
Barrett did not respond to a request for comment. But the justice in the past has spoken of the severe conditions her children endured in Haiti and the difficulties they faced.
Haitian migrants received temporary legal status to live and work in the U.S. after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in 2010 that left the country in ruin and made large parts of it unsafe. For many years, the U.S. government extended those protections as Haiti experienced rising levels of gang violence, disease and poverty.
In June 2025, Kristi L. Noem, then the secretary of homeland security, moved to end those protections, saying the country was now safe to return to. Haitian migrants sued.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday will weigh whether the Trump administration properly terminated temporary protections for Haitian and Syrian migrants. Its decision could ultimately determine the protected status of tens of thousands of migrants from a host of countries, including Venezuela and South Sudan. If the justices side with the Trump administration, those migrants could be deported to their home countries.
Trump’s State Department has issued an advisory not to travel to Haiti, citing “widespread” kidnapping, “exchanges of gunfire with criminal gangs,” civil unrest and limited health care. The advice appears to conflict with Noem’s claim that the country is now safe.
The Supreme Court case comes amid debate about whether some justices are too removed to comprehend the real-world impacts of their decisions. Earlier this month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, criticized conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh for his opinion that supported federal immigration officers targeting people based on race, language, location and occupation.
“This is from a man whose parents were professionals, and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour,” Sotomayor said at the University of Kansas School of Law, according to Bloomberg Law News.
She later apologized for the remarks.
During a talk at the University of Alabama Law School two days later, Sotomayor elaborated on how lived experience can influence her and her colleagues’ decisions. “We’re creatures of what we’re taught,” she said. “We are creatures of the life experiences we have.”
Conservatives are more likely to dismiss the idea that justices can, or should, be influenced by their backgrounds. Barrett has insisted that she can separate her personal experiences — particularly her Catholic religious beliefs — from her legal reasoning. And Sotomayor noted this month that justices can “rise above” their biases.
Empathy and personal relationships may still play a role. One 2015 study found that judges with at least one daughter were more likely to vote in a “feminist fashion” in women’s rights cases than judges with only sons — evidence that personal relationships can affect how judges decide cases. The “daughters effect” was driven largely by Republican-appointed judges, the study found.
Whatever the case, Barrett has probably had more experience with Haiti and its people than any other justice about to decide the fate of the Haitian migrants. And Barrett has been clear about her reasons for wanting to adopt from Haiti.
When she adopted Vivian at 14 months old, Barrett said, the baby girl was so malnourished that she was wearing the clothes of a child 0 to 3 months old. Vivian had been so sick, and had so little practice using her voice, that Barrett did not know whether she would ever be able to talk.
“She was just weak, and she had rickets, so her legs were kind of bowed out,” Barrett said.
Now, Barrett added, Vivian is athletic and “speech hasn’t been a problem.”
The adoption of her son, John Peter, almost did not happen. Barrett explained in the 2019 talk that the paperwork for him had “gone south” and that “mentally and emotionally, we had closed that door.” Then, in 2010, the earthquake struck Haiti, and Barrett received a call from her adoption agency. The State Department had lifted some paperwork requirements, and the agency wanted to know whether Barrett and her husband still wanted to adopt John Peter.
The couple said they did, and Barrett’s husband went to Florida to pick him up.
Adoption from Haiti is a long and complicated process that requires a couple to travel to the Caribbean country for two weeks to get to know the child, according to adoption agencies that work with the country. The whole process can take three to five years, said Herbie Newell, executive director of Lifeline Children’s Services, which has coordinated adoptions from Haiti.
Daniel Nehrbass, president of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which has placed nearly 4,000 children from Haiti and other countries into American homes, said parents generally develop a deep connection with their children’s birth country.
“To love their child is to love their child’s country,” said Nehrbass, adding that he himself has adopted a child from abroad. “It becomes a way to love the child.”
Nehrbass said conditions in Haiti have deteriorated so dramatically that his organization has limited who can adopt from the country.
Marlene Gail Noble, one of the Haiti-born plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, also was adopted by an American couple.
Noble was born in Haiti and abandoned as an infant, according to court filings. In 1993, when she was 2, a faith-based organization brought her to the U.S. to give her medical treatment for spinal tuberculosis. After several foster care placements, Noble was adopted by a Pennsylvania couple at 7 years old.
Although Noble was eligible to become a U.S. citizen upon her adoption, her parents did not submit the right paperwork, according to a brief her attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court. Now an adult, Noble works as a lab assistant and has received TPS to allow her to continue to live in the U.S.
To her, Haiti is a foreign place.
“Forcing me to return to Haiti would not only be devastating but it would also be dangerous and possibly deadly, particularly with my ongoing health issues,” Noble wrote in a sworn declaration. “I have no connections in Haiti, nor resources or direction as to where I would live or how I would survive.”
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