Supreme Court Allows Immigration Officials To Turn Away Asylum Seekers At The Border

U.S. immigration officials can turn away asylum seekers at the Mexican border, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices greenlit a “metering” policy devised under the Obama administration and expanded during President Donald Trump’s first term, under which Customs and Border Protection agents posted on bridges between Mexico and the U.S. turned back many asylum seekers.

The high court’s ruling overturned lower-court decisions that found Congress intended to permit any immigrant approaching a border checkpoint to file for asylum.

The challenged policy was officially rescinded by the Biden administration in 2021, but most asylum seekers at the border have been thwarted by Biden and Trump edicts even broader than the “metering” program.

The Trump administration had asked the justices to uphold the practice’s legality, calling it “a critical tool for addressing border surges and for preventing overcrowding at ports of entry along the border.”

A divided 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panelruled in 2024 that asylum seekers approaching an authorized border crossing are considered to be arriving “in” the U.S. under federal law, entitling them to legal protections even if their applications are initially turned down.

But Justice Samuel Alito, writing for all the court’s conservatives, said the law doesn’t require U.S. officials to accept asylum applications from those who approach the border but don’t actually cross over it.

“We hold that an alien who is standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border,” Alito wrote.

All three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor reading from the dissent she authored aloud from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement. She argued that the meaning of the phrase “arrives in” the U.S. is ambiguous enough to include approaching the border. And she warned that the policy the court blessed was likely to result in tragedies as asylum seekers were turned back to face perilous conditions in Mexico or their home countries.

Sotomayor painted the court’s decision as a stark abandonment of people fleeing persecution, noting that U.S. asylum laws were “developed in response to the international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.”

Sotomayor’s decision to read from her dissent apparently caught Alito by surprise. Following her lengthy statement, he took the highly unusual step of offering a rebuttal, saying he hadn’t known she planned to speak and that if he had, he’d have expanded his oral statement to address some of her points.

“The policy in question was adopted by two very different administrations,” Alito said, noting that officials concluded that it was needed to maintain "orderly and humane” conditions at the border following a huge surge in migrants. Alito also urged those present to read his opinion in detail for additional rejoinders to Sotomayor’s points.

Immigrant rights advocates argued that the “metering” policy was ineffective because it encouraged asylum seekers to cross the border illegally between approved checkpoints.