The US Supreme Court handed US President Donald Trump a victory on Thursday by backing the federal government's authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem US-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.

The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices, overturned a lower court's finding that the policy violated federal law. The Republican president's administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as "metering," after it was dropped by Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

The ruling was one of two in immigration-related cases issued by the court on Thursday backing Trump.

A dissent by the court's three liberals in the asylum case prompted an unusual impromptu rebuke from conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored Thursday's ruling.

The metering policy allowed US immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims. It is separate from a sweeping policy to deny entry to asylum seekers at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.

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 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.

Alito wrote that the answer is "no."

"In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person 'arrives in' a place for example, a house, a city or a country before the person enters that place," Alito wrote. "The context in which the phrase 'arrives in the United States' is used in the immigration statutes at issue here supports an ordinary-meaning reading."

Alito read a summary of his opinion from the bench, as is customary.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was among the three liberal justices to dissent, read a lengthy summary of her dissenting opinion from the bench, an action that signals a justice's strong opposition to a ruling.

In an unusual move, Alito responded from the bench to Sotomayor with an additional defence of the ruling, saying there was much more he would have included in his opinion summary had he known that Sotomayor intended to air her dissent in court.

The other immigration-related ruling issued on Thursday also was authored by Alito. In that one, the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation.

At issue was Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

US immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under Democratic former president Barack Obama amid a migrant surge.

The metering policy was formalised in 2018 during Trump's first term in office, with border officials authorised to decline processing asylum claims when the government decides it is unable to handle additional applications. Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.

The Supreme Court has backed Trump in several immigration-related rulings issued on an emergency basis since his return to the presidency, including allowing him to deport migrants to countries other than their own and to revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.

The court also is expected to rule by around the end of June on the legality of Trump's directive to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States. (Reuters)



Edited by Cecil Wong