Supreme court clears way for Trump administration to turn back asylum seekers at US-Mexico border
The supreme court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to potentially revive an immigration policy once used to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border.
The justices overturned a lower court order blocking the practice that limited the number of people who could apply for asylum each day under the Obama administration and during Donald Trump’s first term.
Advocates said the tactic created a humanitarian crisis as thousands of people settled in unsafe makeshift shelters to await their turn. The Trump administration said it was necessary to deal with an increase of asylum seekers at the border.
The policy isn’t in place now, though authorities have imposed other restrictions on asylum seekers.
The administration argues that metering is a critical tool that’s been used by presidents of both parties and should stay available. Federal attorneys say people turned away at the border could come back later, though lines were thousands of people long when the policy was in place before.
Under federal law, migrants who arrive in the US must be able to apply for asylum and be screened for fear of persecution in their home countries.
The justice department argued that people stopped by authorities haven’t arrived, so immigration agents don’t have to let them apply.
But attorneys for people seeking asylum say the law has long meant anyone arriving at a port of entry should be screened, and blocking arrivals disregards the nation’s ideals.
Metering was first used during the Obama administration when large numbers of Haitians appeared at the main crossing to San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico. It was expanded to all border crossings from Mexico during Trump’s first term in the White House.
It ended in 2020 when the government introduced greater restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, and Joe Biden formally rescinded it in 2021.
The same year, a California-based federal judge found that metering violated the asylum-seekers rights and the law requiring screening. A divided appeals court panel affirmed the ruling but nearly half of judges on the full San Francisco-based court voted to rehear it, a strong signal that might have caught the attention of the supreme court.
Key events
Supreme court rules in favor of former Monsanto company in pesticide case
Carey Gillam
The supreme court has ruled in favor of the former Monsanto company in a closely watched case that limits the way for people to sue pesticide companies for alleged illnesses or injuries.
The decision was made in a 7-2 vote, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh offering the majority opinion and Justice Jackson writing the dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The case, Monsanto v Durnell, specifically dealt with the question of whether a federal law that gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulatory authority over pesticides preempts state claims that a company failed to warn users of certain product risks when the EPA itself has not required such warnings.
In its ruling, the court said the EPA controls pesticide labels to ensure nationwide uniformity, and because the agency evaluated Roundup and decided a cancer warning was unnecessary, state-level lawsuits demanding such a warning conflict with federal law.
The case at the heart of the decision deals with Monsanto’s glyphosate – a weedkilling chemical used in the popular Roundup brand and numerous other herbicide products sold by the former Monsanto company, which is now owned by Germany’s Bayer.
The chemical has been scientifically linked to cancer in multiple studies, and was classified a probable human carcinogen by an arm of the World Health Organization in 2015.
Bayer has spent the last decade fighting more than 100,000 lawsuits filed by people who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma they blamed on exposure to the glyphosate weedkillers, and the company has paid out billions of dollars in jury awards and settlements. All of the cases include allegations that the company failed to warn that glyphosate could cause cancer.
Bayer maintains that its products don’t cause cancer, and also asserts that under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (Fifra), the EPA is the key authority for determining if its product necessitated a cancer warning. The EPA has not required such a warning and has taken the position that glyphosate is “unlikely” to be carcinogenic, so the company cannot be held liable for failing to warn, according to Bayer’s argument.
The court’s decision means the failure-to-warn claims included in several thousand lawsuits pending against Monsanto cannot go forward.
Similarly, thousands of such claims pending against pesticide maker Syngenta cannot proceed. In the Syngenta cases, plaintiffs allege they developed Parkinson’s disease due to exposure to the company’s paraquat weed killer. Syngenta maintains that the evidence linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease is “fragmentary” and “inconclusive”.
Maanvi Singh
The vote was 6-3, with conservative justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett concurring. The court’s liberal justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor all dissented, with the latter penning a biting 35-page long dissent – notably almost twice as long as the Alito majority opinion.
US immigration law entitles migrants arriving in the US to seek asylum; the supreme court case hinged on what, exactly, it means to “arrive in”. When the court considered the case in March, chief justice Roberts and justice Barrett appeared to agree with the Trump administration’s argument – that to “arrive” in the US is to fully set food on US soil. If a migrant is turned back before they are able to cross the border, they are not entitled to asylum, the administration held.
Though much of the supreme court oral arguments about the case centered on the question about what it means to “arrive” in the US and whether the administration is entitled to deny asylum by preventing arrival, the court’s liberal justices also grappled with what it would mean to essentially end the proactive of providing asylum at the US border.
Justice Sotomayor compared the practice of turning away asylum seekers to the tragedy of the St Louis, a passenger ship with Jewish refugees that was turned away from the US right before the second world war. About half the passengers who were returned to western European countries were trapped and killed when Germany invaded.
In Alito’s opinion, he wrote: “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place … before the person enters that place.”
Sotomayor pushed back strongly in her dissent, explaining the dire consequences of the decision, noting that the government may now circumvent a vast range of laws protecting asylum-seekers by simply blocking their entry at the border.
She wrote:
They may do so even if the asylum seeker is at the threshold of a port of entry designated to receive all noncitizens who seek entrance into the country. Even if the port of entry has ample capacity to inspect that person, including an available asylum officer trained to process asylum applications. Even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away.
The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’ Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole. The majority ignores the statutory context and history, not to mention the longstanding position of the Executive Branch, all of which show that any noncitizen arriving at our doorstep and seeking admission must be inspected and allowed to apply for asylum, regardless of whether her foot has crossed the threshold. Because the Court today blesses the Executive Branch’s decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution, despite the detailed inspection and asylum system that Congress enacted and commands, I respectfully dissent.
Here’s my colleague Maanvi Singh’s report on the supreme court’s decision to give the Trump administration a green light to turn back asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, in a ruling that fundamentally reshapes the US asylum system and concludes a battle that has spanned three administrations.
Supreme court allows Trump administration to end legal protections for Haitians and Syrians
In a major ruling, the supreme court has allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.
The decision overturns lower court orders and allows the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.
The Trump administration argued that judges can’t second-guess immigrations officials’ decisions about the protections, which were intended to be temporary.
Immigration attorneys said the countries remain unsafe to return, and the administration ended them in an unlawfully hasty process tinged by racial animus. A reminder that during his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump amplified false rumors about Haitian immigrants.
The justice department appealed to the high court after judges postponed the end of the program for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The supreme court sided with the administration before and allowed it to end of the program for more than 300,000 people from Venezuela.
Federal authorities deny that racial animus played a role. They also cited a supreme court decision from Trump’s first term that rejected bias claims based on his social media posts and upheld a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.
DHS has ended the protections people from 13 countries since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, including some that had been in place for more than a decade.
The terminations were made even though countries like Haiti and Syria remain dangerous, immigration attorneys said. Four Haitian women who were deported from the United States in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, lawyers said in court documents.
The House passed legislation with a rare bipartisan vote in April that would extend protections for Haitians, though the bill has languished in the Senate.
The US first granted protections to Haitians in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake, and extended them multiple times amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.
Syrians, meanwhile, were first granted protected status in 2012, during a civil war that lasted for more than a decade before the fall of president Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it doesn’t provide a path to citizenship.
With the Associated Press.
Here’s my colleague Abené Clayton’s report on the supreme court’s decision to strike down a restrictive Hawaii gun law that bans people from carrying guns in certain public spaces and on private property without the permission of the property’s owner.
Supreme court clears way for Trump administration to turn back asylum seekers at US-Mexico border
The supreme court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to potentially revive an immigration policy once used to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border.
The justices overturned a lower court order blocking the practice that limited the number of people who could apply for asylum each day under the Obama administration and during Donald Trump’s first term.
Advocates said the tactic created a humanitarian crisis as thousands of people settled in unsafe makeshift shelters to await their turn. The Trump administration said it was necessary to deal with an increase of asylum seekers at the border.
The policy isn’t in place now, though authorities have imposed other restrictions on asylum seekers.
The administration argues that metering is a critical tool that’s been used by presidents of both parties and should stay available. Federal attorneys say people turned away at the border could come back later, though lines were thousands of people long when the policy was in place before.
Under federal law, migrants who arrive in the US must be able to apply for asylum and be screened for fear of persecution in their home countries.
The justice department argued that people stopped by authorities haven’t arrived, so immigration agents don’t have to let them apply.
But attorneys for people seeking asylum say the law has long meant anyone arriving at a port of entry should be screened, and blocking arrivals disregards the nation’s ideals.
Metering was first used during the Obama administration when large numbers of Haitians appeared at the main crossing to San Diego from Tijuana, Mexico. It was expanded to all border crossings from Mexico during Trump’s first term in the White House.
It ended in 2020 when the government introduced greater restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, and Joe Biden formally rescinded it in 2021.
The same year, a California-based federal judge found that metering violated the asylum-seekers rights and the law requiring screening. A divided appeals court panel affirmed the ruling but nearly half of judges on the full San Francisco-based court voted to rehear it, a strong signal that might have caught the attention of the supreme court.
Supreme court strikes down Hawaii’s gun restrictions in major second amendment ruling
The US supreme court has struck down a Hawaii law requiring people to get permission to carry guns into stores and hotels, in its latest opinion backing second amendment rights.
The court’s 6-3 decision means that people can carry guns onto privately owned property like shopping malls and gas stations, unless the owners specifically say guns are banned at their establishments.
It comes after the court found last week that marijuana users can’t be completely barred from owning firearms.
Today’s ruling is a win for the Trump administration, which argued that the law violates the second amendment. Hawaii argued that the 2023 measure ensured private owners could decide whether they wanted firearms on their property.
The state passed the law as thousands more people got legal permission to carry guns in the wake of a 2022 supreme court ruling that opened the door for almost all law-abiding Americans to carry concealed and loaded handguns in public.
About four other states have enacted similar laws, though presumptive restrictions for guns on private property open to the public have also been blocked elsewhere.
Hawaii also restricts guns in places like parks, beaches and restaurants that serve alcohol, but those rules weren’t before the court. They are being challenged in lower courts, however.
The suit before the supreme court was filed by a gun rights group and three people from Maui. A judge originally blocked the measure, but an appeals court allowed it to be enforced. The Trump administration backed the supreme court appeal.
With the Associated Press.
US judge blocks Trump’s mail-in voting executive order
A federal judge in Boston has blocked implementation of Donald Trump’s executive order directing his administration to compile a national voter file and to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, preventing it from taking force ahead of November’s midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.
US district judge Indira Talwani sided with several Democratic-led states who argued that the president is trying to unlawfully interfere with the states’ administration of federal elections.
Trump signed the order on 31 March after calling for years for tighter rules on voting by mail and pushing the false claim that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud.
Repeated studies and investigations have shown there is no widespread voter fraud, including fraud through mail-in voting. The president himself voted by mail the week before signing his executive order.
Under the US constitution, states are assigned the role of administering federal elections. His order directs the US Department of Homeland Security to compile and transmit to the states a list of confirmed US citizens eligible to vote in each state, derived from citizenship and naturalization records and other federal databases.
Trump’s order also requires the US Postal Service to only deliver ballots to voters on each state’s approved mail-in ballot list. USPS recently moved to implement Trump’s directive by issuing new proposed rules requiring states to provide the names and barcodes tied to their mail-in ballots.
The order also directs the US Department of Justice to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state and local election officials who issue federal ballots to people deemed “not eligible” to vote.
Voting rights groups sued the administration along with 23 states and the District of Columbia, arguing Trump’s order is unconstitutional and that he lacks any legal authority to assert presidential power over election administration.
The states alleged that allowing Trump’s order to stand would force them to rush to overhaul their election systems before November, causing chaos and likely disenfranchising eligible voters.
Talwani, an Obama appointee, ruled after a different jurist, Trump-appointed US district judge Carl Nichols in Washington DC, declined to issue a preliminary injunction in a related lawsuit brought by Democrats challenging Trump’s order.
Nichols found that the Democrats’ request was premature as Trump’s order had yet to be implemented. They are appealing.
With Reuters.
Supreme court to release opinions with high-stakes cases still to be decided
The supreme court is due to release more opinions in the next few minutes, with the end of the term approaching and many major cases still to be decided, including Donald Trump’s highly controversial bid to end birthright citizenship, his efforts to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians in the US, and his firing of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. We’ll bring you all the key rulings here.
A reminder that the restrictive voting bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate, where Democrats have vowed to oppose it, leaving it short of the votes needed to overcome the filibuster.
Yesterday, Mike Johnson unveiled an idea to try to get around that. He proposed to advance a grant program tied to the bill in a GOP reconciliation package, so that the majority party could bypass the filibuster. The House speaker said he had told Donald Trump that this could be the only path forward for the legislation.
But GOP hardliners are not happy. They argue that Johnson’s plan amounts an incentive program and is therefore insufficient as it would enact only a watered-down version of the Save America Act, creating a fund to encourage states to tap into in order to adopt provisions of the bill rather than enacting the full legislation.
The aforementioned Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican leading the rebellion, wrote on X after Johnson’s press conference:
The save America act cannot be placed in reconciliation and I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid. Neither should you.
And representative Chip Roy of Texas, who is the policy chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and a major proponent of the bill, told The Hill he thinks “grant programs are what they are. They’re incentives.”
States who want to do it would take the incentive. States who don’t wouldn’t necessarily. Maybe it’s pressure. I’m not saying I’m opposed to putting something like that on if there is a moving vehicle that’s otherwise moving in order to get some elements of the election integrity done, but let’s not kid ourselves that it would be full Save. It wouldn’t be.
He added that “every effort should be made to attach the Save America Act to moving vehicles, for example, the housing bill.”
And as if Johnson’s pitch today wasn’t tricky enough, Trump was asked by reporters in the Oval Office yesterday if he would be open to a compromise of including provisions of the Save Act in a reconciliation bill. The president replied:
Not really, no, the Save Act should be … there’s no compromise, it’s voter ID, it’s proof of citizenship, and it’s also the mail-in ballots.
Per our last post, House speaker Mike Johnson is meeting with the president at 2pm ET to try to find a way through the gridlock after a rebellion from GOP hardliners effectively shut down the floor yesterday.
The group of Maga loyalists, led by representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, is insisting that no other legislation can pass until the Senate clears the so-called Save America Act. She posted on X after the upper chamber abruptly went into recess last night:
It is 10pm and Thune just got unanimous consent (meaning not one senator objected) for the Senate to adjourn 19 days (July 13th) meaning the Senate is going home after tonight’s votes.
I will not be voting to re-open the floor until the Senate gets back to Washington. The Senate is literally running and not ONE senator objected to going on vacation before 4th of July.
[Senate majority leader] John Thune is running and hiding because he doesn’t want to get voter ID across the finish line.
If Donald Trump can’t help Johnson break the impasse, the House will also go on recess for the week, sources have told Politico.
Trump to meet House speaker amid showdown on Capitol Hill
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
A dramatic day is in store in Washington DC as Donald Trump heads for a crucial meeting with Mike Johnson, the House speaker, in an attempt to break a legislative gridlock as huge political fireworks have detonated on Capitol Hill far ahead of anything resembling a Fourth of July celebration.
The US Senate abruptly went on recess for two weeks yesterday after a stormy lunch which the US president, who had not visited for a long time, attended. It descended into a shouting match over the US-Israel war on Iran and tests of loyalty. This followed Trump suddenly scrapping the signing of a pivotal bipartisan housing bill hours earlier. Trump’s demands that the Senate change the rules to pass his highly-controversial voter ID bill has led to a gulf between the White House and the upper chamber.
Johnson will attempt to get a reluctant House moving on Trump’s agenda today as a sop. A difficult task.
Here’s what else is happening:
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Maryland’s Democratic US Senator Chris Van Hollen is endorsing the progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary, a split with Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, the Associated Press reports as an exclusive.
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The US supreme court is expected to issue opinions at 10am ET and most of the big cases have not yet been ruled upon. We await immigration and finance-related opinions in particular.
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Huge focus on the Hill where the House speaker, Mike Johnson, meets with Trump at 2pm, with both hoping the House will be persuaded to take a vote and end a rebellion from within the right wing of the Republican caucus over the Save Act to tighten up on who can vote in US elections.
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Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana got into a shouting match with Trump at the Senate lunch on Wednesday after Trump admonished four senators, including him, for backing a resolution to rein in the war in the Middle East. Cassidy reportedly responded: “You have not told the American people what’s going on” with the war, adding afterwards to reporters: “It was supposed to last four weeks. It’s lasted four months,” according to Politico.
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