The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to turn away migrants at the border before they can set foot on US territory and invoke their legal right to seek asylum, marking a decisive victory in a legal fight that has stretched across three presidential administrations.
The 6-3 decision overturns years of lower court rulings that had blocked the practice. Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett formed the majority. Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with Sotomayor producing a 35-page rebuttal that nearly doubled the length of Alito's majority opinion.
The case centered on a single word: what does it mean to "arrive in" the United States? Alito's majority reasoned that without physically crossing into US territory, a person has not truly arrived, and therefore cannot claim asylum protections under federal law. The dissenting justices argued the interpretation gutted the statutory and historical purpose of the asylum system.
Sotomayor's dissent pulled no punches. She wrote that the decision allowed the government to "slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution" even when they stand at designated ports of entry with available asylum officers ready to process their applications. She invoked the St. Louis, the ship carrying Jewish refugees that was turned away from the US in 1939, with about half of those passengers later killed when Germany invaded Europe.
"They may do so even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away," Sotomayor wrote of the government's new authority under the ruling.
The lawsuit originated in 2017 when Al Otro Lado, a California and Mexico-based legal and humanitarian organization, and a group of asylum seekers challenged the turnback policy. The Trump administration had aggressively expanded the practice, abandoning migrants at dangerous encampments along the border. When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he rescinded the policy, but after Trump's reelection, his team asked the Supreme Court to review the lower court decisions that had blocked it.
The turnaround reflects a dramatic shift in how the US has approached asylum over the past decade. During the Obama administration, immigration officials began "metering" the flow of migrants into the country. The shift intensified when tens of thousands of Haitian migrants arrived at the southern border in 2016 after seeking refuge in Brazil following the 2010 earthquake. Some immigration agents began stationing themselves at international bridges to prevent migrants from reaching US ports of entry. Many who were turned away ended up in camps without adequate food or medical care.
The Trump administration formalized and expanded the practice by positioning officers at the border line itself to block asylum seekers from entering US soil.
For Trump's team, asylum has long been viewed as an obstacle to their broader goal of sealing the southern border. Last year, administration officials mounted a global campaign to roll back asylum protections and dismantle the post-World War II refugee framework. At a UN gathering in September, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called the asylum system "a huge loophole in our migration laws."
Under the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security, the government has not only sought to turn away people arriving at the border but has also pressured immigration courts to summarily dismiss asylum claims. The DHS has increasingly sent migrants fleeing persecution to third countries where they have no prior connection or protection.
The Supreme Court's decision ends a legal stalemate that had seen lower courts repeatedly invalidate the turnback policy as contrary to US immigration law and the nation's historical commitment to providing refuge for those fleeing persecution. Now that barrier is gone.
Author James Rodriguez: "The Court just handed the Executive Branch a sledgehammer to dismantle asylum at the border, and Sotomayor's dissent makes clear what that really costs."
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