The US Supreme Court will on Tuesday hear a defense by the administration of President Donald Trump of the government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem US-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle more claims.
The legal dispute is said to have centred on a policy called “metering” that Trump’s administration may seek to revive after it was dropped by his predecessor, Joe Biden.
The policy allowed US immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has appealed a lower court’s finding that the policy violated federal law.
This policy is separate from the sweeping ban on asylum at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.
It was gathered that under US law, a migrant who arrives in the United States may apply for asylum and must be inspected by a federal immigration official.
The narrow legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States
