{"id":214920,"date":"2026-06-26T04:17:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T04:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/supreme-court-lets-trump-turn-back-asylum-seekers-at-us-mexico-border-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T04:17:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T04:17:56","slug":"supreme-court-lets-trump-turn-back-asylum-seekers-at-us-mexico-border-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/supreme-court-lets-trump-turn-back-asylum-seekers-at-us-mexico-border-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme court lets Trump turn back asylum seekers at US-Mexico border – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Decision allows Trump administration to block migrants from entering US soil and the right to claim asylum
US politics live \u2013 latest updates<\/a>
Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email<\/a>
The supreme court<\/a> has given the Trump administration<\/a> a green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system.
The decision allows the Trump administration<\/a> to revive its so-called turn-back or \u201cmetering\u201d policy, allowing federal agents at the US border to stop migrants from physically setting foot on US soil, where federal law guarantees them the right to claim asylum and protection from persecution.
The vote was 6-3, with Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett concurring. Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with the latter penning a biting 35-page long dissent \u2013 notably almost twice as long as the Alito majority opinion.
Because US immigration<\/a> law entitles migrants arriving in the US to seek asylum, the supreme court case hinged on what, exactly, it means to \u201carrive in\u201d.
In Alito\u2019s opinion, he wrote: \u201cIn ordinary speech, no one would say that a person \u2018arrives in\u2019 a place \u2026 before the person enters that place.\u201d
Sotomayor pushed back strongly in her dissent: \u201cThe court\u2019s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: \u2018in\u2019. Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole.\u201d
The decision, she said, would have dire consequences \u2013 allowing the government to circumvent laws protecting asylum seekers by blocking their entry at the border.
\u201cThey 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,\u201d she wrote.
Human rights advocates have said that the court\u2019s 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.
The decision is the culmination of a legal battle that has spanned three presidential administrations. The case was originally filed in 2017, during the first Trump administration, by Al Otro Lado, a legal and humanitarian service provider based in California and Mexico, and a group of asylum seekers subjected to the turn-back policy.
Rather than allowing migrants to turn themselves in at ports of entry and immediately evaluating their eligibility for asylum, officials stood at the border line between the United States and Mexico to block their entry to the US. Migrants were stranded at dangerous encampments or in temporary housing in Mexico while they entered their names on a list to await the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Depending on where migrants were along the border, these lists were kept in physical notebooks or in digital format, maintained by Mexican immigration officials or municipal authorities. Confusion and a humanitarian crisis ensued, and some migrants turned away at official ports attempted dangerous crossings across the Rio Grande or the Sonoran desert.
Joe Biden rescinded the policy in 2021, but after Donald Trump was re-elected to the presidency, his administration asked the supreme court justices to review lower court rulings banning the practice.
Thursday\u2019s decision will have far-reaching consequences, said Erika Pinheiro, Al Otro Lado\u2019s executive director. \u201cIn a world of increasing conflict and climate disaster, this hardening of borders to keep out the most vulnerable is sure to result in many more lives lost,\u201d she said.
The metering policy is currently not in effect at the border, but if it is reimplemented, advocates said they expect another humanitarian crisis will ensue.
Sign up to Breaking News US<\/span>
Get the most important news as it breaks
after newsletter promotion
Rebecca Cassler, a senior litigation attorney at the American Immigration Council, added: \u201cCruelty is not a substitute for real solutions. Blocking people from seeking asylum at official ports of entry will do nothing to fix our broken immigration system; it only makes things more chaotic and dangerous for vulnerable families.\u201d
The supreme court decision came after lower courts repeatedly invalidated the practice of turning away asylum seekers at the border. Advocates and attorneys representing migrants have argued that the practice is illegal and contrary to the country\u2019s long history of providing refuge to those fleeing persecution.
But the Trump administration has long seen asylum as a roadblock in its goal of shutting down the southern border. Last year, administration officials promoted a global campaign to roll back asylum protections, seeking to dismantle<\/a> the post-second world war framework supporting refugees and asylum seekers. During a United Nations gathering in September, the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, characterized the asylum system as \u201ca huge loophole in our migration laws\u201d.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Trump has sought to not only turn away people arriving at the border, but also urged immigration courts to summarily dismiss asylum claims. Increasingly, the DHS has been sending migrants fleeing persecution in their home countries to third countries where they have never been.
A shift toward limiting access to asylum at the southern border, however, began during the Obama administration, when officials sought to \u201cmeter\u201d the flow of migrants into the US. Asylum claims at the border had increased alongside dwindling opportunities for other types of immigration, and lengthy backlogs for visas and green cards. In 2016, tens of thousands of people from Haiti began arriving at the southern border seeking safety; many had first sought to settle in Brazil after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, but made their way north after Brazil, too, experienced a stark economic downtown.
That\u2019s when immigration agents, in some cases, began standing at international bridges, seeking to prevent migrants from reaching ports of entry to the US.
Though much of the supreme court oral arguments about the case centered on the question about what it means to \u201carrive\u201d in the US and whether the administration is entitled to deny asylum by preventing arrival, the court\u2019s liberal justices also grappled with what it would mean to essentially end the practice of providing asylum at the US border.
Justice Sotomayor compared the practice of turning away asylum seekers to the tragedy of the St Louis<\/a>, a passenger ship with Jewish refugees that was turned away from the US right before the second world war. About half the passengers who were returned to western European countries were trapped and killed when Germany invaded.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Decision allows Trump administration to block migrants from entering US soil and the right to claim asylumUS politics live \u2013 latest updatesSign up for the Breaking News US newsletter emailThe supreme court has given the Trump administration a green light to block asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a decision that fundamentally reshapes the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-214920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}