Big win for Trump: US Supreme Court allows govt to turn back asylum seekers at US-Mexico border

The US Supreme Court on Thursday gave US President Donald Trump the green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. The move is now seen as fundamentally reshaping the US asylum system. With this, the ruling would allow the Trump administration to revive its so-called turn-back or “metering” policy, allowing federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from physically setting foot on US soil.

The vote was 6-3 in favour of the crackdown, with Supreme Court justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett concurring. Meanwhile, Democratic-leaning Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the initiative.

The latter went on to pen a biting 35-page-long dissent – notably almost twice as long as the Alito majority opinion. It is pertinent to note that since the US immigration law entitles migrants arriving in the US to seek asylum, the Supreme Court case hinged on what, exactly, it means to “arrive in”.

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The debate among the judges

In Alito’s opinion, he wrote: “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place … before the person enters that place.” Meanwhile, Sotomayor pushed back, stating: “The court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in’. Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole.”

She argued that the decision would have dire consequences – allowing the government to circumvent laws protecting asylum seekers by blocking their entry at the border. “They may do so even if the asylum seeker is at the threshold of a port of entry designated to receive all non-citizens who seek entrance into the country. Even if the port of entry has ample capacity to inspect that person, including an available asylum officer trained to process asylum applications. Even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, human rights advocates have said that the court’s decision allows the Trump administration to essentially invalidate international and US asylum laws, which require government officials to inspect people arriving at ports of entry and ensure that they are not being turned back to dangerous conditions.