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The US supreme court agreed on Monday to hear a defense by the Trump administration of the government’s authority to limit the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry along the US-Mexico border.
The court took up the administration’s appeal of a lower court’s determination that the “metering” policy, under which US immigration officials could stop asylum seekers at the border and decline to process their claims, violated federal law.
The policy was rescinded by former US president Joe Biden, but Donald Trump’s administration has indicated it would consider resuming it. The supreme court is expected to hear the case and issue a ruling by the end of June.
The metering policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the US-Mexico border that Trump issued after returning to the presidency on 20 January. That policy faces an ongoing legal challenge.
Under US 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 case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the US.
US immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under former president Barack Obama amid a surge in migration numbers. The metering policy was formalized in 2018 during Trump’s first term in office, with border officials being permitted to limit the processing of asylum claims when ports of entry were at capacity. Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.
The advocacy group Al Otro Lado launched the long-running legal challenge in 2017 with a lawsuit arguing that the metering policy violated federal law, which states that any non-US citizen who arrives in the US may apply for asylum.
Trump’s justice department argued in a supreme court filing that the case was not moot and that his administration would probably resume the use of metering “as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step”, without providing specifics.
The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 decision 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” are commonly understood to mean “entering a specified location, not just coming close to it”.
“Allied forces did not ’arrive in’ Normandy while they were still crossing the English Channel,” justice department lawyers wrote, referring to the 1944 D-Day landings during the second world war. “And a running back does not ‘arrive in’ the end zone when he is stopped at the one-yard line,” it added, in a football analogy.
The Trump administration has repeatedly asked the supreme court this year to allow it to proceed with policies that lower courts have impeded after casting doubt on their legality.
The court in interim rulings has backed Trump in most of these cases. For instance, it has allowed Trump to deport migrants to countries other than their own without offering a chance to show harms they may face and to revoke temporary legal status previously granted by the government on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants.
