The Supreme Court ruled that the government can turn away asylum seekers at the border.
“This case presents a straightforward question: whether an alien who seeks to enter the United States from Mexico ‘arrives in the United States’ when he or she is still in Mexico,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the 6-3 decision. “In the decision below, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit answered ‘yes.’ That is wrong.”
“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,” he argued. “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.”
“An alien standing in Mexico does not ‘arrive in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border,” Alito noted.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan dissented. In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that asylum seekers, prior to 2016, could enter the United States “like any other traveler seeking to enter the United States.”
“The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in,’” she wrote, adding, “One woman who had fled Honduras after receiving death threats from gang members was beaten, cut, and knocked unconscious by an unknown man after being turned back from a port of entry.”
The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case last year. “Before this litigation, border officials had repeatedly addressed migrant surges by standing at the border and preventing aliens without valid travel documents from entering,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the petition, adding that a court declared that practice “unlawful, on the theory that aliens stopped on the Mexican side of the border have a statutory right to apply for asylum in the United States and to be inspected by federal immigration officers.”
