By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to rule in favor of President Donald Trump's administration in its defense of the government's authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
The justices heard arguments in a legal dispute involving a policy called "metering" that the Republican president's administration may seek to revive after it was dropped by Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden in 2021. The policy let U.S. immigration officials stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims.
The Trump administration has appealed a lower court's finding that the policy violated federal law. The metering policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. 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 narrow legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Most of the conservative justices and one of the liberal justices appeared sympathetic toward the administration's position.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Kelsi Corkran, the lawyer who argued on behalf of the immigrant advocacy group Al Otro Lado that challenged the metering policy, on what it means to arrive in the United States.
"How close do you have to be to the border?" Barrett asked. "Could you say that someone arrives in the United States if they're at a portion of the border that does not have a port of entry? Like, what is it, if it's not crossing the physical border? What is the magic thing, or the dispositive thing, that we're looking for where we say, 'Ah, now that person, we can say, arrives in the United States?"
'KNOCKING AT THE DOOR'
Corkran asserted that under the statute, people arrive in the United States when they are at the "threshold of the port's entrance about to step over."
Under the metering policy, Corkran said, "that process of arriving is interrupted by the border officer physically blocking them from completing the arrival."
Some of the court's conservatives and liberal Justice Elena Kagan pushed back on Corkran's suggestion that, prior to the metering policy, arriving in the United States had long been understood as analogous to knocking on a front door.
"There's been talk about knocking at the door," conservative Justice Samuel Alito said. "Does a person 'arrive in' the house when a person is not in the house and is knocking at the door asking to be admitted to the house?"
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch asked: "So anybody at the water's edge of the Rio Grande on the Mexican side has 'arrived in' ... but somebody who's on the water's edge has not arrived?"
Vivek Suri, the Justice Department lawyer who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, said, "You can't 'arrive in the United States' while you're still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case."
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed sharp questions to Suri about whether the metering policy violates the letter or spirit of federal law protecting refugees.
"These are people who come to the line, there's an agent standing at the line that's open to everybody else, except refugees, correct?" Sotomayor asked. "They're letting in workers with permits to come in to work. They're letting everybody else in. But they're not permitting the people who come to the line - to the door and knock on it (who) want to claim refugee status."
"Someone on a plane arriving to land in LaGuardia may not have put their foot on U.S. land. But they've arrived in the United States. They're arriving. They're knocking on the door," Sotomayor added, referring to a New York City airport.
U.S. immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under Democratic former President Barack Obama during a migrant surge. The policy was formalized in 2018 during Trump's first term in office, with border officials authorized to decline processing asylum claims when the government decides it is unable to handle additional applications.
The Trump administration has said it likely would resume the policy "as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step," without providing specifics.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 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.
A ruling in the case is expected by the end of June.
(Reporting by John Kruzel and Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
