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The Supreme Court found itself in an unusual position this week, parsing prepositions and debating the finer points of grammar while weighing whether the Trump administration can turn away asylum seekers at the southern border, as detailed in transcripts from the Court’s oral arguments. At the heart of the case is a single phrase in the Immigration and Nationality Act that requires the government to accept asylum applications from foreign nationals who are “physically present in the US” or who “arrive in the US … at a designated port of arrival,” according to legal experts analyzing the statute. Simple enough, right? Not when lawyers get involved, as evidenced by the arguments presented.
The dispute centers on “metering,” a policy the first Trump administration used to manage border crossings by limiting how many asylum seekers could approach ports of entry each day, based on administration memos and court filings. Border Patrol would essentially create a waiting list, turning people back into Mexico until their number came up, as reported in immigration advocacy groups’ lawsuits. Immigration advocacy groups sued, arguing that once someone reaches American soil at a port of entry, they have effectively “arrived in” the United States and must be processed, while the Trump administration counters that you cannot “arrive in” a country while still standing in another one, per the government’s briefs.
During oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito pressed the immigrant rights attorney on the distinction between “arrive at” and “arrive in,” using the analogy of someone knocking at your front door, as recorded in the Supreme Court’s official transcripts. The attorney brushed off the distinction as mere prepositional preference, but Alito wasn’t buying it, according to observers of the proceedings. Justice Brett Kavanaugh jumped in with his own grammatical gripe, ripping into the government’s argument that parenthetical phrases in statutes should be treated differently than text separated by commas or dashes; Do they really mean that, he asked, as noted in the transcript? The government lawyer stood his ground, drawing from prepared remarks.
Even Justice Elena Kagan, usually a reliable vote for the left, appeared sympathetic to the administration’s textual reading at times, based on her comments in the hearings. The self-described textualist seemed to agree that ordinary meaning favors the government’s position, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tried to sidestep the whole mess, arguing the Court should simply vacate the lower court ruling and wait until an actual metering policy is in place before ruling on the merits, as per her statements. Why decide a hypothetical case, she reasoned, when the administration hasn’t even implemented the policy yet?
And the stakes extend far beyond grammar nerds and legal scholars; if the Court sides with the administration, Trump would regain a powerful tool for border management, one that could be deployed quickly if migration surges again, according to policy analysts. If the justices rule against the government, the metering policy would be effectively dead, forcing Border Patrol to process every asylum seeker who reaches a port of entry regardless of capacity constraints, as outlined in potential outcomes from legal experts. A decision is expected by the end of June, and whatever the outcome, it will shape border enforcement for years to come.
Providence watches over the bold.
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