Nine Judges Will Decide Who Gets to Ask for Safety

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether President Donald Trump may categorically ban migrants arriving at the southern border from applying for asylum. Nine unelected lawyers in robes will now rule on whether a person fleeing torture is even allowed to ask for help. Arguments are expected in the spring, with a decision by the end of June or early July. The case is Mullin v. Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.

Who Gets Crushed

Behind the case name are real people. Three nonprofit groups and 13 individuals filed a class-action lawsuit in February 2025 challenging the proclamation. "The plaintiffs in this case fled persecution and torture, including political imprisonment and threats from the Taliban," said Keren Zwick, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center. "Yet, the Trump administration refused to honor its obligation to consider them for asylum."

That's the whole story in two sentences. People ran from prisons and the Taliban, reached a border, and were told the door doesn't exist. Immigration authorities have since relied on the policy to summarily remove migrants who enter the country illegally, without letting them apply at all. The order remains in place while the lawsuit grinds on, which means the policy keeps operating while the courts take their time.

Who Has the Power

Trump signed the proclamation on his first day back in office in 2025, suspending entry for migrants "engaged in the invasion across the southern border." It barred them from asylum protections "until I issue a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased." Read that again. The man who declared the invasion also holds the sole power to declare it over. The Department of Homeland Security then issued guidance to carry it out.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer called the measures a "cornerstone" policy and the administration's "most effective" change. He claimed border encounters have fallen by 93 percent, to the lowest levels since the 1960s. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, quoted in the appeal, called asylum one of the "key magnets" for what the filing describes as a flood of aliens. The administration's petition goes further, arguing the president can shut down the asylum system entirely because he has decided he will not grant any. It calls asylum "a purely discretionary benefit" and dismisses applications as "futile" and "empty procedures."

An empty procedure, apparently, is the thing standing between a refugee and deportation.

The Courts Trap

The lower courts ruled against the proclamation. In 2025, Judge Randolph Moss set the restrictions aside, finding that neither the Constitution nor federal immigration law gave the administration authority to replace the rules enacted by Congress. In April, a divided D.C. Circuit panel upheld him. "Barring foreign individuals who are physically present in the United States from applying for asylum... cannot be squared with the statute," wrote Judge Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee.

Here's the catch. Even that victory came with the policy intact. The appeals court stayed its own decision, so the administration kept deporting people while it appealed. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in, and the track record isn't hopeful. Last term the justices sided with a policy letting officials block asylum claims by stopping refugees from reaching the border. Earlier this year they ruled for the administration in a case that could revive the "metering" policy used to turn people back at the border. A ruling for the refugees, the base reporting notes, could still let the administration restart the earlier policy and deny asylum claims anyway.

The ACLU and immigrant rights groups argue the president "may not invent by fiat a new removal system that eviscerates the protections Congress mandated by statute." They're asking one branch of the state to restrain another. It's the third major immigration case on the docket this term, alongside challenges to third-country removals and detention without bond hearings.

Meanwhile, the numbers tell their own story. Unlawful crossings have reached historic lows. Immigration detentions have set new highs.