A major legal battle over the ability of asylum seekers to apply for refuge in the U.S. at ports of entry along the border with Mexico lands at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, as the Trump administration pushes for broad authority to turn migrants away regardless of their claims.
From the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has effectively blocked the entry of all noncitizens at the southern border, including those seeking safety and protection from credible fears of violence and persecution.
Immigrant advocates challenging the approach in multiple lawsuits allege it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act mandate that noncitizens who are “physically present in the U.S.” or who “arrive in the U.S. … at a designated port of arrival” must be allowed to apply for asylum.
The dispute largely turns on competing interpretations of what it means to “arrive in” the country.
The Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., March 18, 2026.
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“In ordinary English, a person ‘arrives in’ a country only when he comes within its borders,” Trump Solicitor General John Sauer argues in a court filing. “A person does not ‘arrive in the United States’ if he is stopped in Mexico.”
Nicole Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, an immigrant rights group and plaintiff in the case, says Congress had a more nuanced view when it drafted the law following the U.S. failure to accept Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
“The right to seek asylum at the border is a legal right and a moral right,” Ramos said. “The stakes are not theoretical. They are measured in lives.”
Trump has invoked multiple legal authorities to support his current border crackdown.
At issue in the case being argued Tuesday is the so-called “turn back” policy from Trump’s first term that kept asylum seekers waiting in Mexico as a method of “metering” access at border crossings that faced overcrowding.
While the administration voluntarily discontinued the practice in 2021 after a lower court deemed it unlawful, the government insists it has broad discretion to regulate the border and now wants the justices to approve the ability to reinstate the policy if necessary.
President Donald Trump speaks during the “Shield of the Americas” Summit at Trump National Doral in Miami, March 7, 2026.
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“Administrations of both major parties have opposed the [lower court] decision, which deprives the Executive Branch of a critical tool for addressing border surges and preventing overcrowding at ports of entry,” Sauer wrote. “This Court should reverse.”
Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, an immigrant rights group representing several asylum-seeker plaintiffs, said a ruling for the administration could have a major impact, even if not immediate.
“We have no doubt the administration is seeking a decision that will give them even more leeway to restrict the rights of people seeking asylum,” Crow said.
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers who arrived at the U.S. southern border during Trump’s first term were forced to remain in Mexico for weeks or months in sometimes harrowing conditions in hopes they might have a chance to be interviewed about their fears of persecution.
One of those migrants was Benito, a Mexican asylum seeker who declined to give his last name to protect his identity and spoke through a translator at an event hosted by Al Otro Lado.
Asylum seekers prepare to enter the United States as a Mexican immigration official checks their documents for their CBP One appointments at El Chaparral border crossing port in Tijuana, Mexico, Jan. 17, 2025.
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“I was partially tortured, had a lot of lesions, and emotional harm, and traumas and I’m still healing from that,” he said of the violence he was trying to escape. “I knew I could apply for asylum in that moment, on the side of Mexico, and so I did everything correctly. I came close; I told the [U.S.] immigration agents that I needed to apply for asylum because I was scared and thought I would be killed.
“I had scars on my body, on my face, and my head,” he said, “but they said to me that they couldn’t help me, couldn’t accept me.”
The court is expected to issue a decision on the Trump administration’s bid to resurrect the “metering” and “turn back” policy by the end of June.
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