High court boosts administration’s power in asylum, deportation cases
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday strengthened the Trump administration’s ability to deport people seeking asylum without allowing them to make their case to a federal judge.
The high court’s 7-2 ruling applies to people who are picked up at or near the border and who fail their initial asylum screenings, making them eligible for quick deportation, or expedited removal.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the high-court opinion that reversed a lower-court ruling that said asylum-seekers must have access to the federal courts.
Congress acted properly in creating a system “for weeding out patently meritless claims and expeditiously removing the aliens making such claims from the country,” Alito wrote.
He noted that more than three-quarters of people who sought to claim asylum in the past five years passed their initial screening and qualified for full-blown review.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with the outcome in this case, but did not join Alito’s opinion.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “Today’s decision handcuffs the Judiciary’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to safeguard individual liberty.” She was joined by Justice Elena Kagan.
Lee Gelernt, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued the case in the Supreme Court, said the outcome will make it hard to question the actions of immigration officials at the U.S. border. “This decision will impact potentially tens of thousands of people at the border who will not be able to seek review of erroneous denials of asylum,” Gelernt said.
In practical terms, the impact may be limited. Even after the ruling from federal appeals court in San Francisco that the justices threw out Thursday, only about 30 asylum-seekers whose claims were quickly rejected had sought access to the courts, Gelernt told the justices during arguments in February.
Cornell University law professor Stephen Yale Loehr, an immigration expert, said the decision lends support to administration action on asylum.
“Justice Alito used sweeping language in his majority opinion upholding Congress’s efforts to limit due process for arriving immigrants. While not necessary to the precise holding in the case, the Trump administration is sure to use such language to justify its broader efforts to restrict asylum seekers,” Yale-Loehr said.
The administration has made dismantling the asylum system a centerpiece of its immigration agenda, saying it is rife with abuse and overwhelmed by meritless claims. Changes include making asylum-seekers wait in Mexico while their cases wind through U.S. immigration court, denying asylum to anyone on the Mexican border who passes through another country without first seeking protection there, and flying Hondurans and El Salvadorans to Guatemala with an opportunity to seek asylum there instead.
Monday, the administration published sweeping new procedural rules that would make it much more difficult to get asylum, triggering a 30-day period for public comment before they can take effect.