Supreme Court allows border agents to turn asylum seekers back to Mexico

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that federal law lets border agents turn asylum seekers back to Mexico before they physically enter the United States, clearing the way to revive the metering policy at crowded ports of entry. The decision gives the Trump administration new room to block people on the Mexican side of the border from making asylum claims in the United States.

The case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, centered on whether someone stopped outside a port of entry has arrived in the United States for asylum purposes. Justice Samuel Alito delivered the opinion, siding with the administration’s reading of the Immigration and Nationality Act and reversing lower-court rulings that had found the practice unlawful.

Metering has been one of the most consequential tools in the border fight. It began in 2016 under the Obama administration as a response to a surge of Haitian asylum seekers at the San Ysidro port of entry in California, then expanded during Donald Trump’s first term. The Biden administration later rescinded it, but the ruling reopened the possibility that Customs and Border Protection officers could again tell would-be asylum seekers to wait in Mexico when ports are too crowded to process more claims.

Al Otro Lado, a California-based immigrant-rights organization, filed the lawsuit in 2017 with 13 individual asylum seekers. The legal fight stretched across three administrations and turned on a narrow but decisive question of border law: whether a person waiting on the Mexican side can be treated as not yet having reached U.S. territory for asylum purposes.

Immigration advocates warned that the policy would leave people fleeing persecution stranded in dangerous conditions in Mexico. HIAS condemned the ruling on June 25, 2026, saying it undercut the right to seek asylum. Supporters of the administration framed the issue as one of border-management authority, and the ruling marked a major expansion of executive control over who can reach the asylum process in the first place.

The decision came the same day the court also allowed the Trump administration to end temporary protections for migrants from Haiti and Syria, delivering two major immigration victories for the White House as it pressed a harder line at the border.