Facts of the Case
Beginning in 2016, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) implemented a “metering” policy at ports of entry along the United States-Mexico border to manage asserted capacity constraints. CBP officers stationed at the physical boundary line turned away asylum seekers lacking valid travel documents, preventing them from stepping onto U.S. soil to undergo mandatory inspection and processing. These officials instructed migrants to return to Mexico and wait for future processing opportunities, often without providing specific appointment times, forcing numerous asylum seekers to endure prolonged delays in Mexican border towns where they faced significant safety risks.
While these asylum seekers waited, the federal government promulgated the “Asylum Transit Rule” in 2019, which generally rendered noncitizens ineligible for asylum if they traveled through a third country without first seeking protection there. This regulatory change prejudiced individuals previously turned away under the metering policy because, had CBP processed them upon their initial arrival, the Transit Rule would not have applied to their claims. Al Otro Lado, a legal aid organization, joined thirteen individual asylum seekers to file a class-action lawsuit challenging the metering policy and seeking to prevent the government from applying the Transit Rule to those who attempted to enter before its enactment.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California declared the metering policy unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act and permanently enjoined the government from applying the Asylum Transit Rule to class members . The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s conclusion that the policy unlawfully withheld mandatory agency action, but narrowed the injunction to prevent the district court from forcing the government to unilaterally reopen past asylum denials.
Questions
Does a noncitizen who is stopped on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border “arrive[] in the United States” within the meaning of Immigration and Nationality Act?
Conclusions
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Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a non-citizen who is physically standing in Mexico does not “arrive in the United States”—and therefore has no statutory right to asylum processing or immigration inspection—merely by approaching or attempting to cross the border. Those rights attach only when the non-citizen actually crosses onto U.S. soil. Justice Samuel Alito authored the 6-3 majority opinion of the Court.
The plain meaning of “arrives in the United States” resolves the case. To “arrive” means to “reach a destination,” and the preposition “in” means “within the limits, bounds, or area of” a place—so a person arrives in a destination only upon entering it, not by approaching it or being blocked at its threshold. This ordinary meaning holds even when someone prevents entry: a running back stopped at the one-yard line has not arrived in the end zone, and a guest whose knock goes unanswered has not arrived in a house. Several features of statutory context reinforce this reading. Other INA provisions explicitly cover both actual entry and attempted entry, yet §§1158(a)(1) and 1225(a)(1) contain no “attempt” language—a deliberate omission Congress is presumed to have made intentionally. The INA elsewhere refers to aliens arriving “near” a land border, language Congress conspicuously chose not to use in the asylum and inspection provisions. And Congress’s 1996 amendment replacing the prior phrase “at a land border or port of entry” with “arrives in the United States” signals a meaningful change in scope — the new language requires physical presence inside the country.
The asylum seekers’ principal counterargument rested on the anti-surplusage canon—the interpretive rule that courts should give every word in a statute independent meaning. Section 1158(a)(1) covers both aliens who “arriv[e] in the United States” and those “physically present in the United States,” and the seekers argued that reading “arrives in” to require physical presence makes it entirely redundant. This argument carries some force but does not overcome the contrary evidence. The anti-surplusage canon is not absolute; Congress sometimes enacts overlapping provisions. Here, the partial redundancy is explained by Congress’s simultaneous creation of expedited removal in 1996 — the “arrives in” language was added to §1158(a)(1) to track the triggering event for that new process, while the “physically present” clause was retained to cover aliens who entered the country earlier and later decide to seek asylum. The two phrases are not fully coterminous. Even if some redundancy remained, an interpretation that accepts modest redundancy is preferable to one that contradicts what the words ordinarily mean. Finally, the presumption against extraterritoriality—the legal principle that U.S. statutes apply domestically unless Congress clearly says otherwise—reinforces the majority’s reading, because the respondents’ interpretation would extend the statute’s reach to conduct occurring on foreign soil.
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred, writing separately to flag two additional issues the Court should address in a future case: first, that the district court's class-wide declaratory judgment likely ran afoul of the INA's prohibition on class-wide injunctive relief against certain immigration statutes, and second, that any statute requiring the President to admit non-citizens against his will would unconstitutionally intrude on the President’s inherent executive authority to exclude aliens.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented (joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson), arguing that the majority fixated on a single preposition while ignoring statutory context, legislative history, and decades of executive branch regulations—all of which show that Congress intended the asylum and inspection obligations to cover non-citizens who present themselves at the threshold of a port of entry regardless of whether their foot has technically crossed the border.
Justice Jackson dissented separately, arguing that the Court should not have granted certiorari at all because the government rescinded its metering policy years ago, rendering the case likely moot and forcing the Court to resolve major legal questions in an abstract factual vacuum without a concrete record of how metering actually operates.
