The Topline: A U.S. Supreme Court ruling will allow enforcement of a new Trump administration policy to deny asylum for most migrants coming to the southern border.
- The policy is meant to reject anyone who passed through another country and didn’t seek asylum there before arriving in the U.S. The new rule will require that migrants first try to find safe haven in other countries.
- Only migrants who have been denied asylum in another country or are victims of severe human trafficking will be permitted to apply.
- The justices’ order came late Wednesday evening and will undo a lower court ruling that blocked the new policy in certain states on the U.S. southern border.
- The ruling allows the new policy to be put into effect nationwide, even as the court case against it continues.
- The decision is a shift away from decades of U.S. immigration policy.
- Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor were the only dissenters.
- According to the New York Times, the case will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court.
Crucial quote: “It is especially concerning, moreover, that the rule the government promulgated topples decades of settled asylum practices and affects some of the most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere — without affording the public a chance to weigh in,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion on the case.
Key background: The Trump administration unveiled the policy in July, but it was blocked from taking effect by a lower court ruling in California almost immediately. Since then, courts nationwide have gone back and forth about the implementation of the policy. Litigation is still ongoing with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, who challenged the rule.
- The ruling marks the third time that the Supreme Court has allowed an immigration initiative from the Trump administration. The court allowed the administration to use $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds to build a wall along the Mexican border in July. Last year, the court upheld Trump’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.
- The new policy will deny most migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. from Central and South America. Mexican migrants will not be affected by the ruling, as they do not pass through another country on their way to the U.S.
- Most of the migrants coming through the southwestern U.S. border are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. So far in 2019, U.S. Border Patrol has arrested 419,831 migrant family members from those countries, compared with 4,312 family members from Mexico.
