(Washington) Do asylum seekers in the United States have to have physically crossed the border with Mexico to submit their request? This is the question that the conservative majority Supreme Court agreed to examine on Monday.
The Trump administration, which has announced its desire to slash the number of refugees welcomed each year, has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the decision of an appeals court in this case.
Immigration law provides that an immigrant may apply for asylum “when he or she arrives in the United States.”
For many years, successive administrations considered that this implied the physical presence of the applicant on American territory.
But in October 2024, a federal appeals court concluded that the plaintiff was considered to have “arrived in the United States” as soon as he presented himself to a U.S. official at the border, even if that encounter occurred in Mexico.
“Prior to this litigation, border officials responded to migrant influxes by positioning themselves at the border to prevent the entry of aliens without valid travel documents,” wrote Trump administration legal counsel John Sauer in his appeal to the Supreme Court.
The decision of the court of appeal “deprives the executive branch of a vital tool to deal with influxes at the border and prevent saturation of entry points along the border,” he deplores.
The Supreme Court therefore agrees to look into the matter during its annual session, which ends at the end of June.
The policy of physically preventing immigrants from crossing the border to file their asylum application in the United States “was an illegal process by the government,” the immigrant rights organization Al Otro Lado responded in a statement.
“Families, children and vulnerable adults fleeing persecution found themselves trapped in perilous conditions, risking violent attacks, kidnapping and death,” underline the NGO’s lawyers, specifying that they will defend these arguments before the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration made public in October its intention to reduce the number of refugee statuses granted by the United States to around 7,500 per year compared to around 100,000 under Democratic President Joe Biden.
Donald Trump has made the fight against illegal immigration a top priority, speaking of an “invasion” of the United States by “criminals from abroad” and communicating extensively on expulsions of immigrants.
