The Supreme Court announced Friday it will hear a case over the legality of President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order that largely barred people from applying for asylum at the southern border.
The high court will hear Mullin v. Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services later this term, dealing with one of Trump’s signature immigration policies. The Supreme Court will consider whether the policy, which the administration implemented as part of sweeping immigration policy changes when entering office last year, is lawful, and whether the federal district court’s ruling striking it down was too broad.
The Trump administration had appealed the ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which found the policy unlawful earlier this year, rejecting claims that the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes the president to suspend asylum applications at the border. In its request for the Supreme Court to take up its appeal, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that federal courts were interfering with “one of the administration’s most important policy initiatives.”
“This case involves the President’s exercise of his inherent and delegated authority to secure our southern border, which had become overwhelmed by an ungovernable influx of millions of aliens, creating chaotic conditions that criminal and terrorist organizations exploited to threaten our national security,” Sauer wrote in his petition. “The most important and effective pieces of the President’s response—suspending the illegal entry of aliens and precluding their access to asylum—have remained in place since January 20, 2025, and throughout this litigation.”
The Trump administration implemented the policy in January 2025 to restrict the number of people who would apply for asylum and then be released into the country while their asylum claims were pending. The administration claims that the process it ended with the order has been ripe for perpetuating illegal immigration, noting that it is hard to remove people who filed asylum claims from the country even if their claims are denied.
The Supreme Court will likely hear the case for oral arguments sometime between February and April 2027, with a decision expected by the end of June.
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The case on Trump’s asylum on the southern border adds to the Supreme Court’s busy docket of cases regarding immigration policies this term. In December, the Supreme Court will consider a challenge to the Trump administration’s third-country deportation policy, while later this term, the high court will examine the administration’s mandatory detention policy for illegal immigrants.
The Trump administration has had a mixed record on the Supreme Court’s merits docket since the beginning of last year, but with immigration issues, the administration has had overwhelming success.