The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed open to arguments from the Trump administration that it has a right to turn asylum seekers away at border ports of entry, even if they have potentially valid claims and follow the legal process for pursuing them.

Central to the case, Noem v. Al Otro Lado, is the question of whether someone who arrives at a port of entry along the southern U.S. border has the right to claim asylum, even if officials physically block them from actually entering the country. Much of the morning’s arguments hinged on the interpretation of the phrase “arrives in” — as in, whether someone who had arrived at an official port of entry, but not been allowed to cross onto U.S. territory, could be said to qualify under the wording of immigration law.

“Does a person ‘arrive in’ the house when the person is not in the house, and is knocking at the door, asking to be admitted to the house?” asked Justice Samuel Alito, part of the court’s conservative majority.

Current immigration law states that someone “who arrives in the United States” must be allowed to make an asylum claim, giving them the opportunity to at least make an initial case that they face danger if turned away. Starting in 2016, however, U.S. border guards began a policy of “metering,” turning back people who had come to present a claim before they could do so. Lower courts rejected the policy, but amid the immigration crackdown of Trump’s second term, the administration has sought the authority to reinstate it.

Kelsi Corkran, an attorney arguing for the humanitarian group Al Otro Lado and a group of asylum seekers, said the government was offering a “nonsensical” reading of the law that failed the United States’ ideals and treaty obligations. The law’s wording, she argued, reflected its amendment history as well as “the natural way that we talk.”

“‘In’ is just how you describe being in a region. You wouldn’t say, ‘At the United States.’ You would say, ‘In the United States.’ I am arriving ‘in Baltimore’ when I’m on the train and it’s coming in. I am ‘at Penn Station’ when I’m ‘in New York,’” she said.

Some of the conservative justices seemed skeptical.

“This seems very artificial, trying to figure out at the threshold, on the line, in the middle of the river — because wherever the line is, the government is presumably going to stop you on the other side of that line and prevent you from getting to wherever the line is,” said Justice Brett Kavanaugh at one point. Whatever the threshold was, he suggested, the government would have an interest in stopping people short of it.

“If we say ‘100 yards from the threshold,’ they’re going to stop you 125 yards from the threshold,” he posed as a hypothetical. “In other words, the ‘arrives in’ thing seems kind of artificial.”

Corkran responded by noting that ports of entry extend right to the border, and that if the U.S. government went beyond that to repel asylum seekers, they would be operating in Mexico without authority.

Kavanaugh also seemed unmoved by Corkran’s argument that the turnback policy advantaged asylum seekers who crossed the border without authorization, because they would be on U.S. soil by the time they encountered an immigration agent, making it easier for them to pursue asylum, versus if they had been turned away at a border port.

“The answer to that could be better enforcement of people coming in unlawfully, and Congress might have assumed — particularly [when the law was last amended] in 1996, when there was an increased effort to prevent illegal immigration — that people wouldn’t be flooding in unlawfully,” he said.

Vivek Suri, an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general who argued on behalf of the federal government, spent much of his time parsing the language of immigration statutes: “The text of the statute should control the court’s decision, and that text is, ‘arrives in the United States,’” he said toward the end of arguments.

Suri also said that the metering policy was a matter of responding to “overwhelmed” ports of entry when the policy was active — “so it was necessary for the ports to say that ‘sorry, we’re at capacity, try again some other time,’” he argued. He said the administration disputed a 2020 inspector general’s report that found some border ports rejected asylum seekers even when they had the capacity to process them — the purported reason for the policy in the first place.

The turnback policy ended during the Biden administration, when judges at the district and appeals levels ruled against it. (Today, asylum rights are essentially nonexistent along the border because of other Trump policies that face their own legal challenges.)

Suri also argued that the Supreme Court had the authority to rule in the case, despite the policy no longer existing, in part because the administration intended to reinstate it. He didn’t say when or under what conditions.

“This case isn’t moot, because we’d like to reinstate metering, and we’re being prevented from doing so,” Suri said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor referenced the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, hundreds of whom were later murdered by Nazis after being turned away by the United States and other countries. The incident, widely considered a historic humanitarian tragedy, had been referenced in briefs presented to the court before arguments.

“They were off the coast of Florida and we didn’t let them dock [or] interview them at all,” Sotomayor said. “We didn’t consider whether they were being persecuted, and the majority of those people were shipped back, or had to go back from where they came, and were killed. That’s what we’re doing here, isn’t it?”

Suri said the case was not about morality.

“I do not deny the moral weight of claims made by refugees, but that is not the question before the court,” he said.

“The question before the court is: What obligations did Congress impose in the asylum and inspection statutes, and those refer only to aliens who ‘arrive in’ the United States.”

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