The U.S. Supreme Court has recently agreed to reassess a longstanding immigration policy that barred asylum seekers from entering at ports along the southern U.S. border.
President Donald Trump petitioned the justices to examine a Ninth Circuit decision that classified the policy as illegal.
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The Biden administration abolished the practice known as “metering.”
The Trump administration aims to preserve adaptability while augmenting its immigration enforcement initiatives.
A few months ago, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer asserted, “The Constitution delegates the power to regulate the border to the political branches, not the judiciary.”
Sauer asserted that the ruling undermines Congress’s authority to formulate asylum policy, citing its connection to existing policies.
It also substantially infringes upon the executive branch’s authority to regulate the nation’s borders.
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Sauer asserted, “Based on the reasoning of the decision below, [Customs and Border Patrol] was barred from impeding the entry of an individual who presented themselves at the border without a prior appointment.”
“An alien may claim to have arrived ‘in the United States,’ thereby requiring governmental inspection and processing of his asylum application, which would allow him to bypass the queue,” Sauer added.
“The asylum-seekers challenged the government’s petition, claiming that the appellate court’s ruling applied exclusively to a particular cohort of migrants,” Sauer continued.
The Immigration and Nationality Act mandates that individuals within the United States, regardless of their location, possess the right to seek asylum if they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin.
In 2016, due to a surge of Haitian asylum-seekers at the San Ysidro port of entry in Southern California, the Obama administration directed border agents to deny entry to newly arriving migrants.
Two years later, the Department of Homeland Security officially implemented the policy, providing all southern border ports with “metering guidance.”
According to the 2018 policy, the government tasked border agents with identifying potential asylum-seekers and actively preventing their entry into U.S. territory.
In 2019, the Trump administration established a new barrier for migrants, stipulating that individuals who passed through one or more countries before arriving in the U.S. would be ineligible for asylum unless they had first sought protection in at least one of those transit countries.
A lower court has certified a class of asylum seekers who arrived before Trump’s transit rule, issuing an injunction that reinstates claims previously rejected under the 2019 policy.
The class promoted the progression of the case following the Biden administration’s repeal of the metering policy in 2021. The transit regulation was ultimately revoked in 2023.
In 2022, the lower court rendered a conclusive judgment, instituting a permanent injunction that prohibited the government from enforcing the asylum restrictions against that specific group.
The court affirmed that individuals in this category had the right to pursue asylum in accordance with previous policy directives.
The Ninth Circuit evaluated the legality of the metering policy to determine whether to uphold the remedy.
The panel ruled in favor of the asylum-seekers, dismissing the government’s claims that migrants denied entry at ports were not unlawfully deprived of asylum under the metering policy because they were not present in the U.S.
The Trump administration implored the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling, contending that alternative measures, such as the Biden-era CBP One application intended for asylum appointment scheduling for migrants, could be jeopardized.
The nonprofit immigrant rights organization Al Otro Lado and 13 asylum-seekers who initiated the lawsuit in 2017 expressed support for the Ninth Circuit’s ruling and are prepared to defend it before the Supreme Court.
“The government’s turnback policy represented an illegal tactic to circumvent these obligations by physically impeding asylum-seekers at ports of entry and obstructing their access to cross the border for protection,” asserted attorneys for Al Otro Lado and the asylum-seekers.
“Vulnerable families, children, and adults fleeing persecution were abandoned in perilous situations, facing violent assaults, abduction, and death,” Lado claimed.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
