Supreme Court lets Trump turn back border asylum seekers

The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for the Trump administration to turn away asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border before they step onto U.S. soil, a 6-3 ruling that reshapes access to asylum at legal entry points.

The decision allows the administration to revive a policy that immigration officials have used to limit how many migrants may request protection each day at ports of entry. The practice, known as “metering,” lets officers stop people on the Mexican side of the border before they can file asylum claims in the United States.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

“In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place… before the person enters that place,” Alito wrote, calling the case “straightforward,” according to the BBC.

Under federal law, a noncitizen who is “physically present in the United States” or “arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum, a legal protection for people fleeing persecution. The case turned on what it means to “arrive in” the country. The Trump administration argued that migrants stopped while still in Mexico had not arrived and therefore were not entitled to apply.

“You can’t arrive in the United States while you’re still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case,” Vivek Suri, an assistant to the solicitor general, told the justices during arguments in March, the BBC reported.

Lawyers for asylum seekers and immigrant advocates argued that people reach the United States for purposes of asylum law when they arrive at a designated port of entry and present themselves for inspection. Kelsi Corkran, of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, told the court that migrants have arrived when they are at the “threshold of the port’s entrance about to step over.”

Sotomayor, writing in dissent, said the ruling allows the government to evade asylum protections by physically blocking people at the border, even at ports of entry meant to receive noncitizens seeking admission.

“They may do so even if the asylum seeker is at the threshold of a port of entry designated to receive all noncitizens who seek entrance into the country,” she wrote. “Even if the port of entry has ample capacity to inspect that person, including an available asylum officer trained to process asylum applications. Even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away.”

She added that the majority’s interpretation was driven by “a fixation on a single word: ‘in,’” and said the court had ignored statutory context, history and the executive branch’s longstanding position that noncitizens arriving at the border must be inspected and allowed to seek asylum.

The case, Noem v. Al Otro Lado, began in 2017 during Trump’s first administration. It was filed by Al Otro Lado, a legal and humanitarian service provider based in California and Mexico, and asylum seekers who had been turned back.

The practice began under the Obama administration as officials sought to manage rising numbers of asylum claims at the southern border. The Trump administration later formalized it by stationing officers at the international boundary line to prevent migrants from setting foot on U.S. soil. President Joe Biden rescinded the policy in 2021, but after Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration asked the Supreme Court to review lower court rulings that had found the practice unlawful.

The BBC also reported that, in a separate ruling, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to strip temporary protections from more than 356,000 Syrian and Haitian immigrants, permitting their removal from protections that had allowed them to remain in the United States.