"In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place ...before the person enters that place."Those words may seem ripped from the pages of Dr.
Seuss, but they are taken from the 6-3 majority opinion of Justice Samuel Alito iin Mullin v.Al Otro Lado.
They captured the lost-in-translation character of the Court's fight over whether undocumented persons must be physically present in the United States to make an asylum claim.In one of a pair of major immigration wins for the Trump administration, the Court ruled that asylum seekers who are stopped on the other side of the Southern border are not present in the United States.If treated as inside the country despite being outside it, these individuals would be allowed to enter and remain while their asylum claims are pending.The case highlights the lengths to which the Biden administration went to facilitate the entry of undocumented persons into the country.
It rescinded a policy of "metering" that was put into place by the Obama administration (and later restored and expanded by the Trump administration).SUPREME COURT AGREES TO REVIEW TRUMP ADMIN EFFORT TO LIMIT IMMIGRANT ASYLUM PROCESSING CLAIMS AT BORDERIn seeking to bar Trump from enforcing the same policy as the Obama administration, the three liberal justices sounded positively Clintonesque in debating what the meaning of "in" is.Justice Sonia Sotomayor denounced the majority's "illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’ Words, however, must be read in context and with attention to how they fit into the statute as a whole."In their view, "contextual" reading means that you can be "in" the United States without actually being "in" the United States.The sharp disagreement in the opinions spilled over to the release of the opinions.
Justice Alito read a summary of his opinion, followed by a more lengthy reading by Justice Sotomayor of her dissent.The stinging dissent produced a rare rebutt...