Supreme Court Rules Trump Admin Can Resume Turning Away Asylum Seekers at Southern Border

AP Photo/Gregory Bull

The Supreme Court of the United States issued several opinions Thursday, including a ruling that a migrant seeking asylum “arrives in the United States” only after crossing the border into the U.S.

The case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, was a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas also filed a separate concurring opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson; Jackson wrote a separate dissent as well.

The lawsuit originated as a class action filed by migrants challenging a “metering” policy adopted by the Department of Homeland Security to limit the number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border that U. S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would process and allow to apply for asylum each day. The policy was enforced by CBP officials standing on the U.S. side of the border and preventing migrants in excess of that metering number from entering the country.

The legal issues centered around the definition in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) regarding when a migrant “arrives in the United States” and is deemed an applicant for admission and is legally able to apply for asylum. The plaintiff class argued this was when a migrant was standing in Mexico at the border; the federal government said it only happened after a migrant had crossed the border and entered the U.S.

The Ninth Circuit had agreed with the plaintiffs that a migrant could be deemed to have arrived in the U.S. while still in Mexico.

“That is wrong,” wrote Alito, calling the issue a “straightforward question” and reversing and remanding the case back to the Ninth Circuit:

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. The context in which the phrase “arrives in the United States” is used in the immigration statutes at issue here supports an ordinary-meaning reading. So does the presumption against extraterritoriality.

This “ordinary meaning” interpretation of the phrase “arrives in the United States” as it is “used in everyday speech” and in other immigration laws makes a clear distinction between “actual entrance into the United States and attempted entrance,” wrote Alito, and “[a]n alien who unsuccessfully attempts to arrive in the United States does not arrive in the United States.” Congress could have drafted the law to allow those who arrived “at or near the border to be able to apply for asylum,” he noted, but “Congress did not use those terms.”

In Sotomayor’s dissent, she lamented that “[t]he consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not,” and accused the majority opinion of “bless[ing] the Executive Branch’s decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution, despite the detailed inspection and asylum system that Congress enacted and commands.”

Sotomayor took a different view of the interpretation of the words’ definitions:

The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost en- tirely by a fixation on a single word: “in.” Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole. The majority ignores the statutory context and history, not to mention the longstanding position of the Executive Branch, all of which show that any noncitizen arriving at our doorstep and seeking admission must be inspected and allowed to apply for asylum, regardless of whether her foot has crossed the threshold. Because the Court today blesses the Executive Branch’s decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution, despite the detailed inspection and asylum system that Congress enacted and commands, I respectfully dissent.

Read the opinion here.

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