The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday over whether the federal government can turn away asylum seekers when U.S.-Mexico border crossings are too overwhelmed to process them, a case that could reshape the legal framework for border enforcement for years to come.
At the center of the dispute is a policy known as "metering," which allows immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims when ports of entry are overburdened. The Trump administration is defending the government's authority to use the tool, appealing a lower court finding that the policy violated federal law.
Justice Department lawyer Vivek Suri put the administration's position in plain terms:
"You can't 'arrive in the United States' while you're still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case."
It's a commonsense argument. And the fact that it even requires Supreme Court litigation tells you everything about how far immigration law has drifted from ordinary meaning.
Metering is not some invention of the Trump era, though his opponents would love for voters to believe that. U.S. immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016, under Barack Obama, amid a migrant surge. The policy was formalized during Trump's first term in 2018, as Newsmax reports.
Joe Biden rescinded it during his first year in office, in 2021. The results of that decision played out on nightly newscasts for the next three years.
The advocacy group Al Otro Lado launched the legal challenge back in 2017, and the case has wound its way through the courts ever since. In 2024, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law requires inspection of asylum seekers who "arrive" at designated border crossings, even if they haven't physically crossed into the United States. The court held that metering violated that obligation.
The Trump administration appealed, and the question now sits with the nine justices who will likely decide by the end of June.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pressed Suri with a series of sharp questions designed to frame metering as a policy that selectively targets refugees while letting everyone else through. She asked:
"These are people who come to the line, there's an agent standing at the line that's open to everybody else, except refugees, correct?"
She continued:
"They're letting in workers with permits to come in to work. They're letting everybody else in. But they're not permitting the people who come to the line - to the door and knock on it (who) want to claim refugee status."
Then came the analogy:
"Someone on a plane arriving to land in LaGuardia may not have put their foot on U.S. land. But they've arrived in the United States. They're arriving. They're knocking on the door."
It's a vivid comparison. It's also a deeply misleading one. A passenger landing at LaGuardia holds a ticket, a passport, and has been screened before boarding. They entered a controlled system with documented identity and a legal basis for entry. Comparing that process to an overwhelmed southern border crossing, where officials physically cannot process the volume of claims arriving daily, conflates orderly air travel with a crisis that has strained every community it touches.
Workers with permits have authorization. They went through a process. Drawing an equivalence between legal permit holders passing through a checkpoint and mass asylum claims at an overwhelmed port of entry isn't the argument Sotomayor seems to think it is.
The legal dispute hinges on a single word: "arrive." The Ninth Circuit interpreted it broadly, holding that someone who presents themselves at a border crossing has functionally arrived in the United States, even while standing on Mexican soil. The Trump administration argues the term means what it plainly says. As Justice Department lawyers put it, "An alien who is stopped in Mexico does not arrive in the United States." The administration contends in court papers that the statute contemplates "entering a specified place, not just coming close to it."
If the Court sides with the Ninth Circuit's interpretation, the practical consequence is clear: the government would lose the ability to manage intake at ports of entry, regardless of capacity. Every person who walks up to the line would be entitled to immediate processing, no matter how many thousands arrived that day or how few officers were available. That isn't a legal principle. It's an open-borders mandate dressed in statutory interpretation.
This case does not exist in a vacuum. The Supreme Court has backed the Trump administration in several immigration-related rulings issued on an emergency basis since his return to the presidency, allowing him to deport migrants to countries other than their own and to revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the United States.
The Court's immigration calendar is stacking up quickly:
Each of these cases tests the same fundamental question: does the executive branch have the authority to enforce immigration law as written, or have decades of judicial expansion created a parallel system where enforcement is functionally impossible?
The administration has stated in court papers that it would resume processing asylum claims "as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step," without providing specifics. Critics seize on that vagueness, but the underlying logic is straightforward. When a port of entry is overwhelmed, telling officials they must process every claim immediately, regardless of resources, doesn't protect anyone. It degrades the quality of every screening. It creates dangerous bottlenecks. It rewards those who arrive in volume over those who follow orderly processes.
Metering is triage. Hospitals do it. Airports do it. Every functioning system with finite capacity does it. The only institution where progressives argue capacity limits shouldn't apply is the one protecting the nation's borders.
A ruling is expected by the end of June. The answer will determine whether the federal government retains one of its most basic tools for managing a border that millions of Americans already believe is not managed enough.