By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a victory on Thursday by backing the federal government's authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices, overturned a lower court's finding that the policy violated federal law. The Republican president's administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as "metering," after it was dropped by Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.
The ruling was one of two in immigration-related cases issued by the court on Thursday backing Trump.
A dissent by the court's three liberals in the asylum case prompted an unusual impromptu rebuke from conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored Thursday's ruling.
The metering policy allowed U.S. immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims. It is separate from a sweeping policy to deny entry to asylum seekers 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 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.
Alito wrote that the answer is "no."
"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," Alito wrote. "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."
Alito read a summary of his opinion from the bench, as is customary.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was among the three liberal justices to dissent, read a lengthy summary of her dissenting opinion from the bench — an action that signals a justice's strong opposition to a ruling.
In an unusual move, Alito responded from the bench to Sotomayor with an additional defense of the ruling, saying there was much more he would have included in his opinion summary had he known that Sotomayor intended to air her dissent in court.
The other immigration-related ruling issued on Thursday also was authored by Alito. In that one, the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation. At issue was Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
A MIGRANT SURGE
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 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. Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.
The Trump administration has said it likely would resume metering "as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step," without providing specifics. Trump has pursued hardline immigration policies since his return to office last year.
The advocacy group Al Otro Lado launched the long-running legal challenge in 2017. 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.
The Trump administration, in its legal defense of the policy, argued that the words "arrive in" refer to "entering a specified place, not just coming close to it."
During arguments in the case in March, 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."
The Supreme Court has backed Trump in several immigration-related rulings issued on an emergency basis since his return to the presidency, including allowing him to deport migrants to countries other than their own and to revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.
The court also is expected to rule by around the end of June on the legality of Trump's directive to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
