The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a defense by President Donald Trump's administration of the government's authority to limit the processing of asylum claims at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The court took up the administration's appeal of a lower court's determination that the metering policy, under which U.S. immigration officials could stop asylum seekers at the border and decline to process their claims, violated federal law.
The policy was rescinded by former President Joe Biden, but Trump's administration has indicated it would consider resuming it.
The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case and issue a ruling by the end of June.
The metering policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the southern border that Trump issued after returning to the presidency on Jan. 20. That policy also faces a legal challenge.
Under U.S. law, a migrant who arrives in the U.S. may apply for asylum and must be inspected by a federal immigration official. The legal issue in the case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in America.
U.S. immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under former President Barack Obama amid a migrant surge.
The metering policy was formalized in 2018 during Trump's first term, with border officials permitted to decline processing asylum claims when ports of entry were at capacity. Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.
Trump's administration has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to let it proceed with policies that lower courts have impeded after casting doubt on their legality.
The court in interim rulings has backed Trump in most of these cases.
For instance, it has let Trump deport migrants to countries other than their own without offering a chance to show harm they may face and to revoke temporary legal status previously granted by the government on humanitarian grounds to hundreds of thousands of migrants.
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