Supreme Court to review US government power to limit asylum processing

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By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a defense by President Donald Trump’s administration of the government’s authority to limit the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The court took up the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s determination that the “metering” policy, under which U.S. immigration officials could stop asylum seekers at the border and decline to process their claims, violated federal law. The policy was rescinded by former President Joe Biden, but Trump’s administration has indicated it would consider resuming it.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case and issue a ruling by the end of June.

The metering policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border that Trump issued after returning to the presidency on January 20. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.

Under U.S. law, a migrant who “arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum and must be inspected by a federal immigration official. The legal issue in the case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.

U.S. immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under Democratic former President Barack Obama amid a migrant surge. The metering policy was formalized in 2018 during the Republican Trump’s first term in office, with border officials being permitted to decline processing asylum claims when ports of entry were at capacity. Biden, a Democrat, rescinded the policy in 2021.

The advocacy group Al Otro Lado launched the long-running legal challenge in 2017 with a lawsuit arguing that the metering policy violated federal law, which states that any non-U.S. citizen who arrives in the United States may apply for asylum.

Lawyers for Al Otro Lado and the asylum seekers the group represents said on Monday they look forward to presenting their case to the justices. They said U.S. immigration laws require the government to inspect and process people seeking asylum at ports of entry and allow them to pursue their legal claims in the United States.

“The government’s turnback policy was an illegal scheme to circumvent these requirements by physically blocking asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry and preventing them from crossing the border to seek protection,” the lawyers said in a statement.

“Vulnerable families, children and adults fleeing persecution were stranded in perilous conditions where they faced violent assault, kidnapping, and death,” the lawyers added.

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment.

The department has argued in a Supreme Court filing that the case is not moot and said that the Trump administration likely would resume the use of metering “as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step,” without providing specifics.

Top administration officials in September urged other nations to join a global campaign to roll back asylum protections, a major shift that would seek to reshape the post-World War Two framework around humanitarian migration.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision in 2024 ruled that federal law requires border agents to inspect all asylum seekers who “arrive” at designated border crossings, even if they have not yet crossed into the United States, and the metering policy violated that obligation.

Trump’s administration argued in court papers that the words “arrive in” are commonly understood to mean “entering a specified location, not just coming close to it.”

“Allied forces did not ‘arrive in’ Normandy while they were still crossing the English Channel,” Justice Department lawyers wrote, referring to the 1944 D-Day landings during World War Two.

“And a running back does not ‘arrive in’ the end zone when he is stopped at the one-yard line,” it added, referring to a football game.

Trump’s administration has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court this year to allow it to proceed with policies that lower courts have impeded after casting doubt on their legality.

The court in interim rulings has backed Trump in most of these cases. For instance, it has allowed Trump to deport migrants to countries other than their own without offering a chance to show harms they may face and to revoke temporary legal status previously granted by the government on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)