Supreme Court Will Decide Whether Trump Can Shut Off Asylum at the Southern Border
The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether President Donald Trump can bar migrants who cross the southern border illegally from seeking asylum, taking up one of the central pieces of his immigration crackdown.
The justices will review a federal appeals court ruling that found the policy unlawful, the Associated Press reported. The ban has stayed in effect while the case moved through the courts, and a ruling is due before the end of June, NBC News reported.
The case, Mullin v. Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, grows out of a proclamation Trump signed on Jan. 20, 2025, his first day back in office, declaring that “an invasion is ongoing at the southern border.”
The proclamation suspended the entry of migrants “engaged in the invasion,” and Homeland Security guidance that followed barred them from applying for asylum and allowed quick removal without some of the procedures in federal law, SCOTUSblog reported.
According to the court’s order, the justices will weigh two questions: whether the proclamation and its guidance are lawful, and whether federal immigration law bars the class-wide relief a district judge granted. They declined to take up a third question about the class definition.
The administration told the justices the border “had become overwhelmed by an ungovernable influx of millions of aliens, creating chaotic conditions that criminal and terrorist organizations exploited to threaten our national security.”
The policy, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “rests on a commonsense understanding of the President’s inherent and delegated powers to exclude aliens.” He pointed to a provision of immigration law that lets the president restrict the entry of anyone whose arrival would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” NBC News noted.
The challengers, 13 unnamed migrants who say they were persecuted or tortured at home and three immigrant advocacy groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, argue the ban flouts the asylum process Congress wrote into the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The president “may not invent by fiat a new removal system that eviscerates the protections Congress mandated by statute,” their lawyers wrote.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss sided with the challengers in July 2025. In April, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit largely upheld his ruling, with Judge J. Michelle Childs writing that Congress “did not intend to grant the Executive the expansive removal authority it asserts,” SCOTUSblog reported.
Judge Justin Walker dissented in part, arguing that Trump has the discretion to deny all asylum applications. He agreed, however, that the government cannot send migrants to countries where they would be persecuted.
The D.C. Circuit kept its ruling on hold during the appeal, which has allowed the administration to keep the restrictions in place.
The asylum fight joins a growing list of Trump immigration cases on the court’s docket, including challenges to deportations to “third countries” and to holding immigrants without a hearing, the Washington Examiner reported. In June, the court blocked Trump’s order limiting birthright citizenship.
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