Supreme Court Guts Judicial Review of TPS, Revives Asylum 'Metering' in Same-Day Rulings

What Happened

On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court issued two companion 6-3 rulings on the same day that, together, dismantled two of the last remaining legal checks on the administration's immigration enforcement power: the ability of courts to review whether DHS followed the law at all, and the ability of asylum seekers to even reach US soil to request protection.

Mullin v. Doe: TPS Terminations Placed Beyond Judicial Review

In Mullin v. Doe, Justice Alito, writing for the majority, held that the TPS statute's judicial-review bar (8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(5)(A)) "plainly bars" courts from reviewing non-constitutional challenges to a TPS termination, including claims that DHS skipped required procedural steps. The Court separately considered, and rejected at this stage, an equal-protection challenge, finding the plaintiffs had not shown that racially discriminatory purpose was a "motivating factor." Justice Kagan, dissenting with Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, argued the bar covers only the ultimate determination, not the procedures that must precede it.

The immediate effect: DHS may end TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitians and approximately 6,100 Syrians. Federal courts had previously blocked or paused these terminations, in the Haitian case finding it "arbitrary and capricious." Mullin v. Doe does not merely reverse those specific injunctions -- it removes the legal theory that supported them, and any future ones like them. The ruling also throws into limbo pending challenges to other TPS terminations, including those for Ethiopia, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and some Venezuelans.

Mullin v. Al Otro Lado: Asylum Metering Revived

The same day, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court ruled 6-3 that DHS may physically block asylum seekers at official ports of entry before they set foot on US soil. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito reasoned that asylum seekers turned away at the border are not in the United States and so have not "arrived in" the country, meaning the statutory asylum protections never attach. The case concerned the now-rescinded "metering" policy -- the practice of turning back or slow-walking asylum seekers at the border line itself -- which lower courts had held unlawful; the ruling makes it available to the executive again. The metering theory rests on the idea that if a person never legally crosses into US territory, the statutory and constitutional protections that attach to asylum seekers physically present in the country never trigger.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented from the bench -- a rare and deliberate signal of the gravity of her disagreement -- stating: "The consequences of today's decision are predictable. More people will die. … More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion." She argued that speaking with a border officer at a port of entry is itself the first step of "arriving in" the United States.

What This Entry Documents

A Supreme Court merits ruling is lawful adjudication, not a rights violation. The rights-relevant conduct is the executive's: the TPS terminations, which expose hundreds of thousands of people to removal to dangerous conditions, and metering, which implicates non-refoulement at the frontier. The rulings matter because they remove judicial checks on those executive policies.

Legal Analysis

Evisceration of Judicial Review

Mullin v. Doe is a landmark blow to the separation-of-powers principle that sits at the core of American constitutional rule of law: that executive action is subject to a court check when it affects individual liberty and legal status. The Administrative Procedure Act exists specifically to allow courts to set aside agency action that is arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise contrary to law. By holding that non-constitutional challenges to TPS terminations are not reviewable, the Court has removed the APA check from an entire category of executive immigration action affecting over a million people. This is not a ruling that DHS acted lawfully -- it is a ruling that courts may not ask the question. That distinction matters: an agency insulated from judicial review has no legal incentive to follow the law it is nominally bound by, since no forum exists to enforce compliance.

Conflict With Non-Refoulement and the Refugee Convention

Mullin v. Al Otro Lado places the United States in direct tension with its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which the US is bound by through the 1967 Protocol and implementing domestic law. Article 33's non-refoulement principle prohibits returning a refugee to a place where their life or freedom would be threatened -- a protection that is meaningless if the government can physically prevent a person from ever reaching the point where a refugee claim can be raised. Article 31 further prohibits penalizing refugees for irregular entry when they are coming directly from a territory where they faced threat; metering functions as exactly such a penalty, pushing people back into danger for the "offense" of arriving at a border crossing rather than crossing an unguarded stretch of land nearby. The lower courts that found metering unlawful did so under US statutory and constitutional law; the Supreme Court reversed on statutory grounds and did not address the Refugee Convention, so the international-law tension remains.

Human Stakes and the Combined Effect

Sotomayor's dissent from the bench framed the human cost directly: more deaths, more people turned back into violence. Taken together, the same-day pair represents the most significant judicial rollback of immigration due-process protections of the term. One ruling closes the courthouse door on people already inside the country whose legal status is stripped by executive fiat; the other closes the border gate on people who have not yet arrived. Neither leaves a judicial remedy. The administration now holds essentially unreviewable authority at both ends of the process -- who gets to stay, and who gets to ask.