Supreme Court justices lean towards Trump in asylum-processing case

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to rule in favour of President ⁠Donald Trump’s administration in its defence of the government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem US-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.

The justices heard arguments in a legal dispute involving a policy called “metering” that the Republican president’s administration may seek to revive after it was dropped by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden in 2021. The policy let US immigration officials stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims.

The Trump administration has appealed a lower court’s finding that the policy violated federal law. The ‌metering policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces a continuing 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 narrow legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Most of the conservative justices and one of the liberal justices appeared sympathetic towards the administration’s position.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Kelsi Corkran, the lawyer who argued on behalf of the immigrant advocacy group Al Otro Lado that challenged the metering policy, on what it ⁠means to arrive in the United States.