Justice Samuel Alito announced the Supreme Court’s decision in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado on Thursday morning, then broke from decorum after Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent. He accused her of catching him off guard. The exchange came in a case that lets a federal border policy keep some asylum-seeking noncitizens from physically entering the United States to pursue claims.
Sotomayor then read language that tied the dispute to the Refugee Act of 1980 and to the “moral reckoning that followed the Holocaust and World War II.” Her dissent said Congress passed the law because it did not want the country to repeat the mistakes of its past. She also wrote that people turned away at the border could be blocked from having asylum applications considered at all.
Mullin v. Al Otro Lado
The majority opinion in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado gave a green light to a policy used along the U.S.-Mexico border. Under that policy, Customs and Border Protection officials were positioned to prevent asylum-seeking noncitizens without valid travel documents from physically entering the United States.
Alito said the people at issue had not “arrived in” the country under the ordinary meaning of the phrase because they were not physically in the United States itself. That reading controlled the result in the case and left the border policy in place for people approaching a port of entry.
Sotomayor pushed back on that interpretation. She said “arrived in” does not always mean being inside a physical space, and argued that context matters in reading the statute. She gave Washington, D.C., and Virginia as an example of how a person can be said to have arrived in one place after landing nearby.
Sotomayor’s dissent
Her dissent also reached back to the M. S. St. Louis. Sotomayor said the United States refused to accept over 900 Jewish refugees aboard the ship in 1939, and that more than 250 of those turned away died in the Holocaust. She used that history to argue that the statute should not be read to let officers refuse even to consider asylum applications from people blocked before they step onto U.S. soil.
According to Joan Biskupic, after Sotomayor finished, Alito let his anger flash. He then said, “There is much that I would have added.”
The immediate consequence is clear for people affected at the border: the Court’s reading allows the policy to continue operating against noncitizens who are still trying to enter through a port of entry. The record provided here does not identify any further step the justices will take after Thursday morning’s exchange, leaving the dissent’s challenge as the last word in the case for now.
