The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that asylum seekers physically stopped by U.S. authorities at the border have no legal right to seek safety in the United States.

The case arose from the so-called “metering” policy, which began at the tail end of then-President Barack Obama’s administration and was systematized by President Donald Trump in his first term. The court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines, with Justice Samuel Alito delivering the opinion.

Under the policy, people seeking asylum in the United States by surrendering at ports of entry were turned away by the thousands. When the policy was in effect, metering led to hundreds of cases of assault, kidnap and murder of would-be asylum applicants who were turned away at the border, litigants said.

The policy ended in 2024 as a result of litigation against it, but the Trump administration revived the issue last year.

Now, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, the government has the power to add yet another hurdle to people attempting to legally seek refuge in the United States.

The case before the high court hinged on whether someone could be considered to be “arriving” in the United States — making them eligible to claim asylum — even if they were stopped at the border by U.S. border guards.

“The wisdom of the policy of metering alien arrivals at the southern border is not before us. We decide only that an alien standing in Mexico does not “arriv[e] in the United States,’” Alito wrote for the majority. “The [Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952] neither entitles such an alien to apply for asylum nor requires an immigration officer to inspect him.”

Under the metering policy, guards told asylum seekers that ports of entry had reached capacity and that they must come back another time. But without any organized system for tracking these asylum seekers, some languished in northern Mexico, often away from their support networks and vulnerable to violence. Lower courts found that the policy was unlawful.

Respondents in the Al Otro Lado case expressed their concern that the government could use the metering policy in the future as a basis to simply stop all asylum claims at legal ports of entry.

Alito dismissed those concerns as overreacting to a hypothetical.

“For present purposes, it suffices to say that the rescinded metering policy was never anything like that imagined future policy,” the justice wrote. He asserted that if such a policy came to pass, it would quickly be challenged — although he did not declare that it would be illegal, or that a challenge would succeed.

“The Government’s policy merely delayed entry by some aliens as a way of improving a situation that both interfered with the proper conduct of inspection and created unsanitary, inhumane, and sometimes dangerous conditions at ports of entry. If the Government ever adopts the sort of policy that respondents fear, we are confident it would be quickly challenged.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three dissenting justices, argued that the metering policy violated immigration officers’ duty to inspect people arriving at the border, including those who want to pursue asylum.

She wrote that the court’s decision on Thursday “holds that the Executive Branch may circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having U.S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting foot onto U.S. soil.”

“The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: “in,’” Sotomayor wrote. “Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole. The majority ignores the statutory context and history, not to mention the longstanding position of the Executive Branch, all of which show that any noncitizen arriving at our doorstep and seeking admission must be inspected and allowed to apply for asylum, regardless of whether her foot has crossed the threshold.”

Responding to Alito’s claim that the metering policy amounted to a mere “delay” of the asylum process — and not a practical erasure of it — Sotomayor rejected his logic, saying the majority’s decision Thursday would protect the federal government even if it decided to block asylum seekers “for a few hours, a few months, or forever.”

Respondents in the case reacted to the court’s majority decision with disappointment.

“On the 250th anniversary year of the United States, our federal executive branch is abandoning asylum seekers fleeing perilous circumstances in fear for their lives and putting thousands of people – including children – in dangerous and dire situations,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward — which represented 13 individual asylum seekers who challenged the metering policy — wrote in response to the court’s decision. She urged Congress to act to protect “persecuted people” and “the best of American values.”

“Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that will put even more people in harm’s way.”

The right to seek asylum in the United States once a person has set foot on U.S. soil — even for those who cross the border without authorization — is enshrined in federal law.

But American history is marked by failures to accept refugees, most notably in 1939, when hundreds of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, traveling on the MS St. Louis, were not allowed to disembark on U.S. soil. Many later died in the Holocaust.

“Informed by the suffering of the St. Louis passengers, Congress codified asylum protections at U.S. borders and created orderly procedures to assess asylum claims from people who reach a port of entry and to grant refuge to those who risk persecution if turned away,” humanitarian group HIAS wrote in an amicus brief ahead of oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado (since renamed to Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, after the confirmation of new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin).

“The policy here flouts the law Congress enacted and wrongly turns back the clock to a period when people fleeing persecution were forced to face arbitrary procedures, crushing uncertainty, and prolonged sojourns in dangerous conditions in a legal no man’s land.”

In addition to seeking the potential revival of metering, the Trump administration has pursued several other methods for all but eliminating migration to and asylum-seeking in the United States.

On his first day back in office, for example, Trump declared an “invasion” on the southern border as a pretext for suspending asylum rights there. In April, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found Trump’s action to be unlawful.

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