Supreme Court Clears Trump to Turn Away Asylum Seekers at the Border in 6-3 Ruling

The Supreme Court on Thursday handed the Trump administration sweeping new power over the southern border, ruling 6-3 that immigration officers may turn away asylum seekers who have not yet physically set foot on U.S. soil. The decision revives a contested practice known as "metering," in which agents stationed at ports of entry cap or block the number of migrants allowed to approach each day.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court's five other conservatives, concluding that federal law does not guarantee a migrant the right to apply for asylum until they have actually crossed into the country. The three liberal justices dissented sharply, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the rare, symbolic step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench — a gesture reserved for cases a justice believes are gravely wrong.

The metering ruling was one of a pair of 6-3 immigration decisions issued the same day. In the second, the court cleared the way for the administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from an estimated 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,100 Syrians living legally in the United States, exposing them to the loss of work permits and possible deportation. Together, the cases give the White House authority to remove or block more than a million people, according to immigration analysts.

"This early signal tells us the court has fundamentally reshaped who even gets a chance to ask for protection," said one immigration attorney tracking the litigation, noting that metering had been blocked by lower courts that found it violated migrants' statutory right to seek asylum. Supporters of the policy argue it restores order at overwhelmed crossings and discourages dangerous attempts to rush the border between official checkpoints.

Civil rights groups condemned the rulings within hours. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund called the TPS decision a green light to "deport Haitian families" who have built lives in the country over years, while advocates warned that metering would push desperate migrants toward smugglers and remote desert routes. The Trump administration hailed both outcomes as vindication of its border agenda, with officials signaling they would move quickly to implement the policies. The decisions take effect immediately, and government lawyers said enforcement guidance would follow in the coming days.

Legal scholars said the metering ruling could prove the more consequential of the two over the long run, because it reaches a foundational question about who the nation's asylum laws actually protect. By holding that the statutory right to seek protection attaches only once a migrant has crossed onto U.S. territory, the majority effectively hands border agents a tool to control the flow of asylum claims at the threshold. Lower courts that had blocked the practice now have little room to maneuver, and immigration advocates said they expect the policy to spread to additional ports of entry along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border in the weeks ahead.