Supreme Court to review rescinded Trump policy of turning away asylum seekers at the border

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will review a controversial immigration policy adopted during the first Trump administration of turning away potential asylum seekers before they step foot on American soil, setting up the first major immigration policy case of the term.

Federal law requires the government to process asylum seekers who arrive at ports of entry. But in 2018, President Donald Trump’s first administration began a policy known as “metering,” in which border agents simply turned back potential asylum seekers to Mexico before they entered the US.

An immigrant rights group, Al Otro Lado, and several asylum seekers filed a lawsuit in California challenging the policy. An appeals court based in San Francisco sided with the migrants, and the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court in July.

The practical impact of the litigation, at least for now, is limited at best. The Biden administration rescinded “metering” and instead began requiring most people seeking asylum to make an appointment before arriving at a port of entry. Because of that, Al Otro Lado argued that the case “has almost no present implications, and likely no future implications either.”

But the Trump administration balked at that reasoning, telling the Supreme Court that “this administration and future administrations should retain the option of reviving that practice when border conditions justify doing so.”

In that sense, the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case was already a win for Trump.

A divided 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law requires border agencies to inspect asylum seekers who arrive at ports of entry, even if they did not enter the country. In its appeal to the high court, the Trump administration argued that cannot be right.

“In ordinary English, a person ‘arrives in’ a country only when he comes within its borders,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court. “An alien thus does not ‘arrive in’ the United States while he is still in Mexico.”

But the groups supporting Al Otro Lado said that reading would make a mockery of the asylum process, empowering officials to render “inspection and asylum processing requirements wholly inoperable at ports of entry – the designated places where noncitizens may lawfully come into the United States – by simply blocking asylum seekers from stepping on U.S. soil.”

The court will hear arguments in the case next year and hand down a decision by the end of June.

This story was updated with more details on the case.

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