Key Takeaways:
The Supreme Court cleared the way for President Donald Trump to end protected status for more than 350,000 immigrants and revive a policy turning away asylum seekers at the southern border.
The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump two immigration victories Thursday, clearing the way to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 migrants and revive a policy turning away asylum seekers at the southern border when crossings are deemed overburdened.
"We had to go all the way to SCOTUS to vindicate the principle that an alien is not 'in the United States' until he is, in fact, in the United States," James Percival, general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, said.
In a 6-3 ruling split along ideological lines, the court overturned a lower court's finding that the metering policy — which allows border officials to indefinitely decline processing asylum claims — violated federal law. A second ruling, also authored by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, permitted the administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, writing that the metering decision "authorizes U.S. immigration officers to refuse to consider asylum applications by physically blocking applicants from stepping foot onto U.S. soil."
The twin rulings remove two legal barriers to Trump's immigration enforcement agenda and signal the court's willingness to defer to executive authority on border policy. The administration has said it may resume metering "as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step," while the TPS decision exposes hundreds of thousands of immigrants to potential deportation. The court is expected to rule by the end of June on the legality of Trump's directive to restrict birthright citizenship.
Metering Policy Returns to the Border
The metering policy was first implemented in 2016 under Democratic former President Barack Obama amid a migrant surge, then formalized in 2018 during Trump's first term. The Biden administration rescinded it in 2021. Thursday's ruling overturned a 2024 decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had found that federal law requires border agents to inspect all asylum seekers who "arrive" at designated crossings even before crossing into the United States.
Alito, writing for the majority, rejected that interpretation. "In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person 'arrives in' a place — for example, a house, a city or a country — before the person enters that place," he wrote. In an unusual move, Alito responded from the bench after Sotomayor read a lengthy summary of her dissent, saying he would have included more in his opinion summary had he known her intentions.
Melissa Crow, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the metering challenge, said the ruling "should sound the alarm for anyone who cares about human rights and the rule of law" and "suggests the president may unilaterally override decades of established law."
Broader Immigration Agenda Advances
The rulings are the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions backing Trump on immigration since his return to the presidency. The court has already allowed him to deport migrants to countries other than their own and to revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants. The administration's separate policy to broadly deny entry to asylum seekers at the border also faces an ongoing legal challenge.
The decisions carry significant economic implications for sectors reliant on immigrant labor. Agriculture, construction, hospitality, and technology companies could face tighter labor supply as enforcement expands. The Congressional Budget Office has previously estimated that reduced immigration could lower potential GDP growth by 0.1 to 0.3 percentage points annually, though the administration has argued that enforcement-driven wage gains for domestic workers offset those effects.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
