Today the Trump Administration completed its clean sweep of the non-birthright-citizenship immigration cases at the Supreme Court. Some of these decisions are quite significant. This highlights that the current Court is quite sympathetic to aggressive executive branch action in the immigration sphere--aggressive action often expressly authorized by Congress--even if it is likely to reject the Administration's unlawful attempt to unilaterally rewrite the law of citizenship.
The first immigration decision today was Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, in which the Court held, 6-3 in an opinion by Justice Alito, that an alien seeking to enter the United States from Mexico does not "arrive in the United States" unless and until the alien actually enters the country. This matters because an alien cannot apply for asylum until arriving in the country, and thus allows the federal government to turn away potential asylum applicants before they may seek asylum.
The second immigration decision today was Mullin v. Doe, in which the Court held, again 6-3 in an opinion by Justice Alito, that the statute authorizing "Temporary Protected Status" bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims challenging the revision or rescission of such status. Finding the sole constitutional claim raised in the litigation unlikely to succeed, the Court vacated the district court order postponing the termination of temporary protected status for aliens from Syria and Haiti pending legal challenges to the termination.
