BREAKING: SCOTUS rules Border Patrol can turn away asylum seekers before they reach port of entry

The United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the government in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, saying that migrants who are seeking asylum in the United States but have not yet arrived in the country does not have to be considered for asylum. In other words, if potential asylees are in Mexico waiting to petition for asylum, the government does not have to vet them for that purpose as they are not yet in America.

The court struck down a lower court's ruling which had said that those migrants who are en route to the US and were turned away before reaching the border must be considered to have "arrived in" the US for the purposes of federal immigration law and were therefore permitted to apply for asylum. The Supreme Court references the massive immigration surge experienced in the United States in 2016 where far more migrants than could be processed were arriving at ports of entry. The Department of Homeland Security at the time, in an effort to deal with the onslaught, "metered" those arriving and Custom and Border Patrol would turn away those who were in excess of the number of people immigration agents could process.

Al Otro Lado, an immigration advocacy group, sued the government in 2017, saying that those who were seeking asylum and were turned away were turned away illegally. Those migrants who were turned away were given "class" status, meaning that they could bring a class action suit, the ruling for which would apply to all persons who qualified as part of that group.

"The court granted summary judgment for the class and declared that the Government’s denial of inspection and asylum processing to class members who are in the process of arriving in the United States is unlawful regardless of the purported justification for doing so," SCOTUS summarized. "The Government rescinded the metering policy in November 2021, shortly after the District Court entered summary judgment. A divided panel of the Ninth Circuit then affirmed in relevant part, holding that an alien 'arrives in the United States'—and thus must be inspected and may apply for asylum—when the alien, while standing on the Mexico side of the border, encounters a United States official at the border."

The Supreme Court, however, said that not arriving in the United States, even if that lack of arrival was due to being turned away by border agents, is precisely that: not arriving. Aliens, the court said, may only be considered to have arrived when they have, in fact, arrived across the border in the United States. The metering policy was discontinued after the lower court's ruling and has not been reinstated.

MULLIN, SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY, ET AL. v. AL OTRO LADO ET AL. by The Post Millennial