The Supreme Court Enables Trump’s Cruel Immigration Agenda

Photograph by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In May, 1939, more than nine hundred Jewish refugees sailed aboard the M.S. St. Louis from Hamburg, seeking refuge from Nazi persecution—first arriving in Cuba, then, after most were denied entry, in the United States. The ship came so close that passengers could see the lights of Miami, but it was forced to return to Europe, where more than two hundred and fifty of the passengers eventually died in the Holocaust, in death camps like Auschwitz and Sobibór, or while hiding from the Nazis. In the aftermath of this humanitarian tragedy, the United States took steps—or so lawmakers thought—to prevent it from happening again, ultimately writing asylum protections into federal law. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting Thursday in a Supreme Court ruling that allows immigration authorities to evade these protections, invoked the memory of the St. Louis to underscore the cruelty of the majority’s approach.

“Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past,” Sotomayor wrote, joined only by the court’s two other liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Yet if the refugees on the M.S. St. Louis were to walk up to a port of entry on our southern border today, the majority’s interpretation would allow immigration officers to refuse even to consider their asylum applications by physically blocking them from stepping foot onto U. S. soil. The majority’s interpretation permits the Government to do that even if the refugees complied with all applicable laws and regulations, even if the port had ample capacity to inspect them, and even if turning them back would result in the very persecution from which they narrowly escaped.”

The decision in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado was part of a pair of immigration rulings in which the six conservative Justices, professing judicial restraint and careful adherence to statutory text, sided with the Trump Administration’s efforts to prevent migrants from entering the country and to expel hundreds of thousands of others who are lawfully here. The Al Otro Lado case, which sparked Sotomayor’s anguished dissent, involved the Administration’s bid to avoid processing asylum claims. The Trump Administration claimed, and the Court majority agreed, that it could sidestep the language of the asylum law—which allows anyone who “arrives in the United States” to claim legal protection—simply by preventing asylum seekers who arrive at the border from setting foot in the country. (A version of the policy began during the Obama Administration, when a surge of Haitian migrants at the Mexican border led officials to begin “metering” the number of asylum applicants admitted for processing. It was expanded during Trump’s first term but suspended in 2021, by the Biden Administration.)