Legal experts and immigrant rights advocates say that the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the Trump administration to, for now, continue blocking protections for vulnerable people and families who cross through Mexico effectively ends the U.S. asylum system at the southern border and will be a matter of life or death for hundreds of thousands, not just from the Americas, but around the world.
On Monday, a federal judge blocked Asylum Ban 2.0 nationwide, a decision that was then partially undone by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals the next day. Then one day after that, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court lifted the hold altogether as the case around the ban proceeds. “While a final decision on the asylum ban regulation is still months away,” said Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, “this decision will be a death sentence for many of the vulnerable asylum seekers now seeking safety.”
The group said that among the asylum-seekers who will now be blocked include Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime, as well as Central Americans fleeing gang violence and persecution. Also affected are “Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Chinese, and others who may be religious/ethnic minorities being persecuted, since many of them have increasingly come to the border through Mexico,” tweeted immigration reporter Tanvi Misra.
The Supreme Court’s decision, said La Unión del Pueblo Entero, “will push asylum seekers desperate for protection to cross into the U.S. through dangerous wilderness and swift currents, instead of doing so safely at ports of entry. Many will die or disappear in the process.” The group cites the tragic drowning deaths of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his baby, Valeria, in June. “Desperation drove them to cross through the river after being refused at a port of entry,” said LUPE leader Juanita Valdez-Cox.
”No vote was recorded” in the Supreme Court’s decision The Washington Post reported, “but Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted their disapproval of the court’s action in a strongly worded dissent.” Sotomayor wrote that "although this Nation has long kept its doors open to refugees—and although the stakes for asylum seekers could not be higher—the Government implemented its rule without first providing the public notice and inviting the public input generally required by law."
This is all happening as thousands of vulnerable families have already been waiting along the Mexican border, some for months, for their chance to ask for asylum. They’re now shut out, even though they did exactly as the Trump administration asked of them. “We are in an epic battle for human and civil rights,” tweeted David Leopold, an immigration attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “The carnage is real and irreparable.”