Asylum seekers may be turned away at the southern border, Supreme Court rules

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Set us as preferred WASHINGTON — Asylum seekers may be turned away without a hearing at the southern border, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a historic retreat from the promise of relief for those who say they are fleeing persecution.The justices split over whether this was a simple dispute over legal wording or a moral question involving desperate families.

Siding with the Trump administration, the court’s conservatives said the Refugee Act of 1980 offers a right to seek asylum to migrants who “arrive in the United States” but not those who are turned back when they approach a border crossing or a port of entry.“This case presents a straightforward question” that turns on the word “in,” said Justice Samuel A.

Alito Jr.“In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a city, or a country — before the person enters that place.”The liberal dissenters agreed with immigration rights lawyers who saw this as a nonsensical reading of the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the asylum law arose from the “international moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.” Politics The case posed a clash between the government’s need to manage surges at the border and the moral and historical obligation to offer asylum to those fleeing persecution.She cited the infamous voyage of the MS St.Louis in 1939.

More than 900 Jewish refugees attempted to flee persecution in Nazi Germany by setting sail aboard the ship, which was turned away from Cuba and the United States.Most of the passengers were returned to Europe, and several hundred died in the Holocaust, she said.

“Congress passed the Refugee Act in 1980 because it did not want this country to repeat the mistakes of its past.Yet if the refugees on the M.S.

St.Louis were to walk up to a ...