WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court is set on Tuesday to hear a defense by President Donald Trump's administration of the government's authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle more claims.
The legal dispute centers on 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. The policy allowed U.S. immigration officials to 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. This 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.
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 Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.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 in court papers told the Supreme Court it likely would resume the use of metering "as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step," without providing specifics.
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 argued in court papers that the words "arrive in" refer to "entering a specified place, not just coming close to it."
"An alien who is stopped in Mexico does not arrive in the United States," Justice Department lawyers wrote.
A ruling in the case is expected by the end of June.
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 migrants in the U.S.
The justices next week are due to hear arguments over the legality of Trump's directive to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States. Next month, the court will hear arguments in the administration's bid to revoke temporary legal protections for more than 350,000 Haitians and about 6,100 Syrians living in the United States.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
