WASHINGTON: The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a victory on Thursday by backing the federal government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.

The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered ​by its conservative justices, overturned a lower court’s finding that the policy violated federal law. The Republican president’s administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as “metering,” after it ‌was dropped by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

The ruling was one of two in immigration-related cases issued by the court on Thursday backing Trump.

The metering policy allowed U.S. immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims. It is separate from a sweeping policy to deny entry to asylum seekers at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.

Under U.S. law, a migrant who “arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum and ​must be inspected by a federal immigration official. The legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United ​States.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored Thursday’s ruling, wrote that the answer is “no.”

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“In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place — for example, a house, a ⁠city or a country — before the person enters that place,” Alito wrote. “The context in which the phrase ‘arrives in the United States’ is used in the immigration statutes at issue here supports an ordinary-meaning reading.”

‘MORE PEOPLE WILL DIE’

Alito read ​a summary of his opinion from the bench, as is customary. Justice Sonia Sotomayor then read a lengthy summary of her dissenting opinion from the bench — an action that signals a justice’s strong opposition to a ruling.

Sotomayor, in a ​dissent that was joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that Thursday’s ruling authorizes U.S. immigration officers to refuse to consider asylum applications by “physically blocking (applicants) from stepping foot onto U.S. soil.”

“The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” Sotomayor wrote.

“More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not. More people will be forced to walk along the U.S.-Mexico border in dangerous conditions, trying to find a port that will inspect them. 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,” Sotomayor wrote.

In an unusual move, Alito then responded ​from the bench to Sotomayor with an additional defense of the ruling, saying there was much more he would have included in his opinion summary had he known that Sotomayor intended to air her dissent in court.

The other immigration-related ruling issued on ‌Thursday also was ⁠authored by Alito. In that one, the court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation. At issue was Temporary Protected Status for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

‘AN IMPORTANT TOOL’

James Percival, general counsel at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, welcomed Thursday’s ruling, saying it “opens up an important tool to continue securing our southern border.”

“We had to go all the way to SCOTUS to vindicate the principle that an alien is not ‘in the United States’ until he is, in fact, in the United States,” Percival said, using shorthand for the Supreme Court of the United States. “We ​have yet AGAIN been vindicated by the Supreme Court.”

Melissa ​Crow, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said the ⁠ruling “should sound the alarm for anyone who cares about human rights and the rule of law.”

The ruling, Crow said, “suggests the president may unilaterally override decades of established law and trample on people’s legal rights if doing so suits his political agenda.”

A MIGRANT SURGE

U.S. immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under Democratic former President ​Barack Obama amid a migrant surge. The metering policy was formalized in 2018 during Trump’s first term in office, with border officials authorized to decline processing asylum ​claims when the government decides it ⁠is unable to handle additional applications. Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.

The Trump administration has said it likely would resume metering “as soon as changed border conditions warranted that step,” without providing specifics. Trump has pursued hardline immigration policies since his return to office last year.

The advocacy group Al Otro Lado launched the long-running legal challenge in 2017. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 ruled that federal law requires border agents to inspect all asylum seekers who “arrive” at designated ⁠border crossings, even ​if they have not yet crossed into the United States, and the metering policy violated that obligation.

The Supreme Court also backed Trump in ​several immigration-related rulings issued on an emergency basis since his return to the presidency, including allowing him to deport migrants to countries other than their own and to revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.

The court is expected to rule by around the end of ​June on the legality of Trump’s directive to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States.

ISLAMABAD: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has dismantled an alleged international human placenta smuggling network and uncovered two illegal human biological material processing facilities operating in Islamabad, officials said on Friday.

According to an FIA spokesperson, five suspects — including three Chinese nationals and two Pakistani citizens — were arrested during raids conducted in Islamabad’s F-7/1 and E-11 sectors.

The arrested Chinese nationals were identified as Li Ganglei, Wang Bao, and Pengfei Gao, while the Pakistani suspects were identified as Waqas Sarwar and Qaiser Hanif.

Authorities said the suspects were allegedly involved in collecting, processing, and exporting human placenta by falsely declaring it as “sheep placenta” for shipment abroad, particularly to Vietnam.

During the raids, FIA recovered processing machinery, finished products, and biological samples, including human organs and other suspected human tissue. The seized materials have been sent to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) for forensic examination to determine their exact nature.

According to investigators, the Pakistani suspects were allegedly working as drivers and facilitators for the Chinese nationals and assisting in the procurement and transportation of human biological materials.

Preliminary investigations revealed that human placentas were allegedly collected from hospitals in Peshawar, Rawalpindi, and Lahore before being transported to the processing facilities in Islamabad. Officials said the processed placenta was intended for export, where it is believed to be used in the manufacturing of pharmaceutical and medical products.

The FIA said the suspects had established a well-organized network with the help of local facilitators. Authorities are also searching for additional individuals suspected of involvement in the alleged international smuggling operation.

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A case has been registered against the suspects under the Human Organ Transplant Authority (HOTA) Act, 2010, and further investigations are underway.

Officials emphasized that forensic analysis is ongoing, and the exact nature of all seized biological materials will be confirmed after laboratory testing.