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Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered a blistering dissent from the bench Thursday after the Supreme Court opened the door for the Trump administration to revive an immigration policy that allows border officials to block asylum seekers who do not physically cross the southern border from entering the country.
Sotomayor, the most senior liberal justice on the high court, warned that the decision would leave people fleeing persecution or violence more vulnerable to “dangerous conditions”
“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she read. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.”
The practice of reading a dissent aloud is typically reserved for when justices strongly disagree with the majority opinion. Sotomayor doing so appeared to catch the author of that opinion, conservative Justice Samuel Alito, by surprise.
In a rare response, Alito remarked that he would’ve added more to his initial comments if he had known. He pointed out that the policy had been used by two different administrations to maintain an orderly process at ports of entry.
The “metering” policy was first implemented by former President Obama in 2016 and had been used during President Trump’s first term to limit the number of asylum seekers at the U.S. border with Mexico.
The 6-3 majority found Thursday that noncitizens who were still on the Mexico side of the border had not “arrived” in the U.S. and were therefore not legally entitled to apply for asylum.
Sotomayor argued that interpretation “makes no sense,” comparing it to a situation in which a train conductor might say the train was “arriving at Penn Station” even though it was still half a mile away.
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