As the Trump administration seeks to convince the justices that it can end a program shielding about 350,000 Haitians from deportation, one justice will be listening with firsthand experience with Haiti’s turmoil.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of the court’s conservatives and often a critical vote in high-profile cases, adopted two children who were born in Haiti. During her confirmation hearing in October 2020, Justice Barrett said that she and her husband, Jesse, decided to adopt after they met other couples who had adopted children from other countries.
In 2004, she and her husband visited an orphanage in a suburb of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and ultimately adopted a 14-month-old girl, Vivian, from the facility.
Justice Barrett has said the couple chose Haiti because of the country’s overwhelming poverty and its proximity to the United States, so “we could go as a family and be involved in Haiti as the children got older.”
She told senators during her confirmation hearing that she was struck by the “the lack of access to basic things like antibiotics” at the orphanage and that the experience had made her “appreciate the fact that we had access to health care.”
She described her daughter’s condition when she first joined the Barrett family as “so weak that we were told she might never talk or walk normally” and said she was grateful her daughter eventually grew strong and healthy.
Justice Barrett has said that the couple had wanted to adopt again soon after but ran into paperwork issues when they tried to adopt a boy from the same orphanage. “It looked like it wasn’t going to happen,” she said in a 2019 interview at the Notre Dame Club of Washington, D.C. “So mentally and emotionally, we had closed that door.”
But after a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, the State Department lifted some paperwork requirements for children whose adoptions were in progress, which included the Barretts’ son. The devastating quake also figured into the U.S. government’s decision to extend Temporary Protected Status to Haitians, allowing them to live and work legally in the United States. The Trump administration’s effort to end those protections are at the heart of the case being heard on Wednesday.
Her husband went to Florida in 2010 to pick up their son, John Peter, and to bring him to the family’s home in South Bend, Ind. Justice Barrett described her son’s surprise when he first stepped out into the cold, snowy Midwest winter, adding, “once that shock wore off, J.P. assumed the happy-go-lucky attitude that is still his signature trait.”
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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