The Supreme Court has determined that migrants at the US-Mexico border are ineligible to seek asylum until they have physically entered the United States. This 6-3 decision allows for the reinstatement of a policy originally implemented during the Trump administration that had been previously overturned by the Biden administration.
Justice Alito, delivering the opinion in the case of Noem v. Al Otro Lado, characterized the matter as straightforward. He argued that under typical definitions, an individual cannot be considered to have arrived in a location until they have actually entered it. This ruling effectively overturns a lower court decision that had deemed the asylum-limiting practice, often referred to as metering, to be unlawful. Under this system, immigration authorities can restrict the volume of daily asylum applications by claiming processing centers lack the capacity to handle additional cases.
Separately, the court ruled that the Trump administration is permitted to revoke temporary protected status for over 356,000 Haitian and Syrian immigrants, stripping them of their current legal protections to remain in the country. Throughout the legal proceedings, debates focused on the precise definition of arriving in the U.S., with the government successfully arguing that standing on the Mexican side of the border does not constitute an arrival.
