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SCOTUS Likely To Revive Obama-Era Practice Of Turning Away Asylum-Seekers👉The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to reassess an old immigration policy that turned away asylum seekers at ports of entry along the southern border of the U.S. President Donald Trump asked the justices to look over a Ninth Circuit decision that said the barrier was illegal.The Biden administration ended the practice, which the government calls “metering.” However, the Trump administration wants to keep its options open as it cracks down on immigration.“The Constitution entrusts the power to manage the border to the political branches, not the judiciary,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in November. Citing connections to active policies, Sauer said that “the decision below improperly ‘undercuts Congress’ authority’ to set asylum policy. It also ‘severely intrude[s] on the executive branch’s prerogative to manage our country’s borders.’”A nonprofit immigrant rights organization, Al Otro Lado, along with 13 asylum-seekers who initiated the lawsuit at the heart of the dispute in 2017, expressed their support for the Ninth Circuit’s ruling and are prepared to defend it before the Supreme Court.“The government’s turnback policy was an illegal scheme to circumvent these requirements by physically blocking asylum-seekers arriving at ports of entry and preventing them from crossing the border to seek protection,” attorneys for Al Otro Lado and the asylum-seekers said in a statement. “Vulnerable families, children and adults fleeing persecution were stranded in perilous conditions where they faced violent assault, kidnapping and death.”“Under the logic of the decision below, [Customs and Border Patrol] was not allowed to prevent the entry of an alien who came to the border without an appointment,” Sauer wrote. “Such an alien could claim, after all, that he has arrived ‘in the United States’ and that the government accordingly must inspect him and process his asylum application — effectively allowing him to jump the queue.”The asylum-seekers opposed the government’s petition, stating that the appeals court’s ruling only applied to a subset of migrants.“Although the current administration’s border policies face pending legal challenges, none of the plaintiffs’ claims in those cases turn on the question presented by the petition here,” wrote Kelsi Brown Corkran, an attorney with the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. “The court’s resolution of the question presented would thus amount to little more than an advisory opinion.”The Justice Department declined to comment on the Supreme Court’s decision to hear its appeal. The White House referred questions about the revival of the metering policy to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not answer questions about whether the Trump administration would revive the policy.“As our attorneys have already made abundantly clear, the Trump administration has advanced the clear meaning of federal law and basic common sense in this case since day one,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an email that included a link to the government’s petition. “We look forward to presenting our case to the Supreme Court.”According to the Immigration and Nationality Act, individuals present in the United States, regardless of their location, are entitled to seek asylum if they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin.In 2016, amid a surge of Haitian asylum-seekers at Southern California’s San Ysidro port of entry, the Obama administration took decisive action by instructing border agents to deny entry to newly arriving migrants.Two years later, the Department of Homeland Security officially established the policy, providing all southern border ports with “metering guidance.”According to the 2018 policy, border agents were tasked with identifying potential asylum-seekers and actively preventing them from entering U.S. territory.In 2019, the Trump administration introduced a new obstacle for migrants, stipulating that those who passed through one or more countries en route to the U.S. would be ineligible for asylum unless they had first sought protection in at least one of those transit nations.A lower court has certified a class for the asylum-seekers who arrived before Trump’s transit rule, issuing an injunction that reopens claims previously denied under the 2019 policy.The class enabled the case to proceed following the Biden administration’s repeal of the metering policy in 2021. The transit rule was ultimately revoked in 2023.In 2022, the lower court delivered a decisive ruling, imposing a permanent injunction that prevented the government from enforcing the asylum prohibitions against that specific group. The court affirmed that individuals within this class had the right to pursue asylum in accordance with previous policy guidance.The Ninth Circuit examined the legality of the metering policy to determine if the remedy should be upheld.The panel ruled in favor of the asylum-seekers, dismissing the government’s claims that migrants turned away from ports of entry were not unlawfully denied asylum under the metering policy due to their lack of physical presence in the U.S.The Trump administration called on the Supreme Court to overturn the decision, contending that alternative measures, such as the Biden-era CBP One app that facilitates asylum appointment scheduling for migrants, could be jeopardized.https://conservativebrief.com/supreme-court-could-r-97669/?utm_source=CB&utm_medium=258