Supreme Court Backs Trump on Asylum Rejections at the Border

A 6–3 ruling allows U.S. authorities to turn away asylum seekers before entry and paves the way for ending temporary protections affecting hundreds of thousands

A divided Supreme Court handed a significant legal victory to President Donald Trump, ruling that the U.S. government may reject asylum seekers before they physically enter the country. The 6–3 decision, aligned along ideological lines, affirms the administration’s authority to revive a border practice that permits agents to turn migrants away before they cross the U.S.-Mexico frontier, effectively preventing them from filing asylum claims.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the ordinary meaning of “arrival” requires physical presence. “In common usage, no one would say that a person arrives at a place—whether a house, a city, or a country—before physically entering it,” he wrote, joined by the Court’s five other conservative justices.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized what she described as an overly narrow reading of the law. “The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by its fixation on a single word—‘in,’” she wrote, adding that statutory language must be understood in context.

The case before the Court originated in 2017, when the migrant rights group Al Otro Lado filed suit on behalf of 13 asylum seekers. The challenge stemmed from practices that began informally in 2016 under the Obama administration, particularly in the San Diego area, as authorities grappled with overcrowded border crossings.

Beyond asylum procedures, the ruling also reinforces the administration’s authority to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain groups living legally in the United States. According to the decision, humanitarian protections for nationals of countries such as Haiti and Syria may be revoked, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands to deportation. The policy could ultimately affect more than one million people from 17 countries who held protected status when Trump returned to office.

Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has moved to end protections for citizens of 13 of those countries, including Haiti and Syria, as well as Venezuela, Honduras, Afghanistan and Nepal—many of which the State Department classifies as high-risk environments.

In the majority opinion, Alito also dismissed arguments advanced by Haitian immigrants that the administration’s policy decisions were driven by racial discrimination, describing the legal basis of those claims as weak.

Temporary Protected Status was established by Congress in 1990 to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation to countries destabilized by war, natural disasters or other extraordinary crises. The designation allows recipients to live and work legally in the United States for up to 18 months, with the possibility of renewal—a feature critics within Trump’s political base have long opposed.

“Remember, this is a temporary status,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the Court in April, presenting the administration’s case.

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