The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 17 agreed to review an Obama-era policy that allowed border officials to reject asylum seekers before they arrived in the United States.
The Trump administration is appealing a lower court’s ruling that the policy, known as “metering,” which lets U.S. immigration officials decline to process claims of asylum seekers at the border, runs afoul of federal law.
The Biden administration ended the policy, but the Trump administration is considering reinstituting it.
The justices granted the Trump administration’s petition in Noem v. Al Otro Lado without comment in an unsigned order. No justices dissented.
The petitioner is Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The respondents, who brought the underlying lawsuit, are Al Otro Lado, a California-based nonprofit immigrant advocacy group, and 13 asylum seekers.
The petition states that federal law states that an alien “who arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum and has to be inspected by U.S. immigration officers.
A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit previously held that border agencies must inspect asylum seekers when they arrive at a port of entry, even if they do not set foot inside the United States.
Sections 1158 and 1225 of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act “require border officials to inspect noncitizens seeking asylum at the border, and the metering policy withheld that duty,” the petition states.
But the Ninth Circuit held in the class action that “an alien stopped on the Mexican side of the U.S.–Mexico border ‘arrives in the United States,’” according to the petition.
“[That ruling is] erroneous and warrants this Court’s review,” the petition reads.
“In ordinary English, a person ‘arrives in’ a country only when he comes within its borders. An alien thus does not ‘arrive in’ the United States while he is still in Mexico.”
The Trump administration stated that it wishes to retain the option of reviving metering “when border conditions justify doing so,” the petition states.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling against metering “removed a critical tool from DHS’s toolbox for addressing border surges, ‘seriously [harming] our country’s ability to manage its borders,’” the petition states, quoting from a dissent one of the circuit judges filed in the case.
Metering came about during the Obama administration, when “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) faced a ‘massive surge’ of illegal aliens seeking admission at ports of entry along the U.S.–Mexican border,” according to the petition.
The large volume of individuals exceeded processing capacity at the ports and put great strain on CBP resources, compromising the agency’s ability to care for those in its custody, according to the petition.
In November 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) adopted the metering policy, which allowed CBP to address overcrowding at ports of entry by preventing “aliens lacking valid travel documents” from entering the United States.
In 2018, during the first Trump administration, the DHS formalized the Obama-era policy. In 2019, the Department of Justice adopted a new rule called the transit rule, establishing new asylum eligibility criteria.
In November 2021, the DHS under the Biden administration rescinded the metering rule, the petition stated.
The respondents had urged the Supreme Court to reject the petition in a brief filed on Oct. 8.
Their brief states that the federal government’s interpretation of the law “would empower border officials to render the [Immigration and Nationality Act’s] inspection and asylum processing requirements wholly inoperable at ports of entry—the designated places where noncitizens may lawfully come into the United States—by simply blocking asylum seekers from stepping on U.S. soil.”
“This plainly is not what Congress contemplated when it mandated inspection and processing of arriving asylum seekers,” the brief reads.
Oral arguments in the case have not yet been scheduled.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Nov. 17, 2025, in The Epoch Times.