The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a major immigration victory Thursday, ruling 6-3 that the federal government can legally turn back asylum-seekers before they step onto U.S. soil, preserving a border policy the administration has indicated it could revive in the future.
The ruling centered on the practice known as “metering,” which began under former President Barack Obama before later being expanded and eventually discontinued. The policy allows border officials to stop migrants from entering at ports of entry, preventing them from setting foot in the United States and invoking asylum-processing protections.
Writing for the court’s conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito concluded that migrants who never cross into the United States have not legally “arrived” and therefore are not entitled to seek asylum under federal law.
“In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a city, or a country — before the person enters that place,” Alito wrote.
“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,” he added later.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor taking the unusual step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench to underscore her disagreement with the ruling.
“The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in,’” Sotomayor wrote. “Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole.”
Sotomayor argued that federal immigration law requires authorities to process migrants who reach ports of entry.
Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.
“Since 1917, Congress has required immigration officers to inspect noncitizens who arrive at ports of entry to determine whether they may enter the United States,” she wrote.
“This system is designed to ensure that the Government processes each person seeking to come into the United States to determine who should be let in, who should be turned away, and who should be allowed to apply for asylum.”
She also accused the majority of allowing the government to “circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having U. S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting a foot onto U. S. soil.”
Federal law allows noncitizens who “arrive in” the United States to apply for asylum. But because migrants turned away under metering remain on the Mexican side of the border, the government argued they never legally arrive in the country and therefore cannot invoke those protections.
The Supreme Court agreed with that interpretation.
The lawsuit was filed in 2017 by immigrant-rights group Al Otro Lado and 13 asylum-seekers after the Obama administration began using metering the previous year to address overcrowding at ports of entry, particularly in the San Diego area.
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