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WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a victory on Thursday by backing the federal government’s authority to turn away migrants when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices, overturned a lower court’s finding that the policy violated federal law. The president’s administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as “metering,” after it was dropped by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.
The ruling was one of two in immigration-related cases issued by the court on Thursday, backing Trump. The metering policy allowed U.S. immigration officials to stop migrants at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims.
Under U.S. 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 current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored Thursday’s ruling, wrote that the answer is “no.”
“In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a city, or a country — before the person enters that place,” Alito wrote. “The context in which the phrase ‘arrives in the United States’ is used in the immigration statutes at issue here supports an ordinary-meaning reading.”
The other immigration-related ruling issued on Thursday was also authored by Alito. In that one, the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation. At issue was Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
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