The Court Moved the Border to the Far Side of the Line

On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration two immigration victories that look separate but work together. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado¹, the Court said asylum seekers stopped on the Mexico side of the U.S. border have not legally arrived in the United States, so federal officers do not have to inspect them or let them apply for asylum before they cross. In Mullin v. Doe², the Court allowed the administration to move ahead with ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, holding that the TPS statute blocks courts from hearing non-constitutional challenges to those termination decisions.

I do not think these rulings create entirely new immigration powers from nothing. Congress wrote territorial language into the asylum law, and Congress made TPS temporary and highly dependent on executive judgment. But that concession misses the point. The Court has meaningfully changed who can claim protection in practice because it strengthened the executive’s control over the thresholds where immigration rights become usable: the physical border for asylum seekers and the country-designation switch for TPS holders.

Start with the border. Asylum is protection for a person who can show a fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group; the basic federal asylum statute says a noncitizen who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States may apply for it, regardless of immigration status, according to 8 U.S.C. §1158⁵. A port of entry is the official crossing point where people and goods are inspected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The question in Al Otro Lado was brutally concrete: if an asylum seeker walks up to the U.S.-Mexico border at a port, encounters U.S. officers, and is stopped before setting foot on U.S. soil, has that person arrived?

The Court’s answer was no. The majority held that a person standing in Mexico arrives in the United States only by crossing the border, and that the Immigration and Nationality Act therefore neither entitles that person to apply for asylum nor requires an officer to inspect them while they remain outside U.S. territory, according to the Court’s opinion¹. That is a technical reading with large consequences. If the government controls the last few feet before the legal trigger, it controls whether the asylum process starts at all.

The policy at issue is called metering, or queue management: officers limit how many people may enter a port of entry each day, often by standing at or near the border line and turning people back. The Court’s opinion describes metering as a practice adopted in 2016 and later formalized in 2018, and the Associated Press reported³ that the ruling clears the way for the Trump administration to potentially revive a policy that previously produced lines of thousands of people waiting in Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security did not say immediately whether it would restart metering, but its general counsel praised the decision as opening an important tool for securing the southern border, according to the same AP report³.

This is where the legal formalism breaks down. It is true that someone who crosses into the United States and qualifies under the asylum statute can still seek asylum. It is also true that expedited removal, the fast-track process for removing certain arriving or recently present migrants, still includes a credible-fear screening if the person expresses fear of persecution, as 8 U.S.C. §1225⁶ provides. But the ruling makes the pre-entry checkpoint decisive. Due process, in this context, means the basic legal chance to be heard before the government deprives someone of liberty or protection. If a person is kept just outside the place where statutory inspection and asylum duties attach, the claim never reaches the process that is supposed to sort genuine fear from weak claims.

The government’s strongest answer is that metering already existed. That is right. A 2020 DHS inspector general report⁸ found that CBP used queue management at 24 southwest border ports, that seven ports stopped processing virtually all undocumented migrants including asylum seekers by redirecting them elsewhere, and that officers at four ports returned people to Mexico despite a legal requirement to process asylum claims of people physically present in the United States. Title 42, the pandemic-era public-health expulsion policy, also showed how huge a threshold barrier could become; KFF found⁹ that from 2020 through 2023 there were close to 3 million southwest border expulsions under Title 42 authority, though many involved repeat attempts by the same people.

But history cuts both ways. Preexisting practice does not make Supreme Court validation unimportant. Before Al Otro Lado, metering was a contested enforcement tactic vulnerable to statutory challenge. After Al Otro Lado, the executive has a much stronger answer: until the person crosses, the asylum and inspection statutes do not bite. That does not change the refugee definition. It changes the practical path to getting that definition applied.

The TPS ruling works from the other direction. Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is a humanitarian status Congress created for nationals of countries where war, disaster, or other extraordinary conditions make return unsafe. TPS does not create permanent residence. While it lasts, beneficiaries generally receive protection from removal and work authorization, and the Secretary of Homeland Security must periodically review country designations under 8 U.S.C. §1254a⁷.

The Court in Doe leaned hard into that structure. Syria had received TPS in 2012 during the Assad-era conflict, and Haiti had received TPS in 2010 after a devastating earthquake, according to the Court’s opinion². The Trump administration later issued termination notices for both countries, and lower courts had paused those terminations while litigation continued, according to the same opinion². The Supreme Court held that the TPS statute’s no-review provision bars non-constitutional claims challenging termination decisions, including challenges to the process leading to those decisions, according to Mullin v. Doe².

The numbers are not marginal. The Associated Press reported⁴ that the ruling directly applies to about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, and that it may signal what is coming for nearly 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 countries. AP also reported that Supreme Court decisions generally take effect 32 days after announcement, meaning implementation was not expected before July 27, 2026, and that lawyers expected Haitians and Syrians whose employment authorization comes through TPS to likely lose that authorization around then, according to the AP’s June 25 report⁴.

Here too, the counterargument has force. TPS was never a promise of permanence. Former TPS holders may still have other claims, including asylum, withholding of removal, protection under the Convention Against Torture, family-based status, or some other lawful status. Losing TPS is not the same as being categorically barred from every form of relief.

Still, the cliff is real. Once TPS ends for a country, the individual facts that make a person sympathetic or rooted in the United States do not keep TPS alive: years of work, U.S.-citizen children, a mortgage, an employer who depends on them, or fear about worsening conditions back home. Those facts may matter in another proceeding if the person has another legal hook. They do not defeat the countrywide termination. Doe makes that termination much harder to attack in court unless plaintiffs can frame and prove a constitutional claim.

That is why I think the Court did more than validate old tools. It converted two disputed limits into stronger executive gates. At the border, the gate is geographic: no crossing, no statutory asylum application. Inside the country, the gate is categorical: no TPS designation, no TPS-based work authorization or protection from removal.

The administration still has to implement these rulings. ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is the agency that arrests, detains, and removes people inside the United States, and the immediate question for TPS holders is whether DHS and ICE move quickly from loss of status to workplace disruption, detention, and removal proceedings. At ports of entry, the immediate question is whether CBP revives physical metering, digital appointment caps, or some hybrid that keeps asylum seekers outside U.S. territory while claiming they may try again later.

The indicator to watch is not whether asylum law or TPS still exists in the U.S. Code. They do. The indicator is whether people can reach the legal forum where those protections are judged. A right that begins only after you cross a line is a right the government can weaken by controlling the line. The Supreme Court did not erase humanitarian protection on June 25. It made the doorway narrower, and then handed the executive more power over the door.