When the Supreme Court rules 6-3 that asylum seekers waiting at a U.S. port of entry have not "arrived" in the United States — so officers may turn them away before they ever set foot on U.S. soil — what do religious traditions and the Constitution say about the right to ask for refuge?
Religious traditions converge with unusual force on the refugee's right to <em>ask</em> — not to be guaranteed admission, but to be heard at the gate. The Torah's cities of refuge, Jesus' "I was a stranger and you welcomed me," the Quran's honoring of the Ansar — all of them assume the question can at least be put. The 1980 Refugee Act, in line with the international convention the United States signed, was drafted to track that principle: the right to apply does not depend on where you ask. <em>Mullin v. Al Otro Lado</em> reads that statute narrowly enough that the right to ask now depends on the very entry the law's text said it did not. The decision is within the recognized range of statutory interpretation, and the executive does need real latitude at the border; reasonable people will read it differently. But the underlying question — whether the United States is a country where the persecuted may stand at the gate and be heard — is the older question, and the one religious traditions are most insistent should have a yes for an answer.
Religious perspectives
Almost every religious tradition with a body of law makes the protection of the refugee — the person fleeing persecution who has come to the gate — a specific and named obligation, not a discretionary act of generosity.
Judaism: The command to protect the ger — the stranger or sojourner — appears more than thirty times in the Torah, more than any other repeated command. "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21); "Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 10:19). The Torah also gives the refugee an institutional form: the six cities of refuge (Numbers 35:9-15), where someone fleeing pursuit had a right of physical access — to enter, to speak, to be heard. The Hebrew Bible's emphasis is consistently on access first, judgment after. A regime that prevents the person from approaching the gate at all is, in this framework, denying the threshold the law was built around.
Christianity: Matthew 25's criterion of the King's judgment — "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" — names welcome of the stranger as one of six tests of righteousness. The Greek word translated "stranger" (xenos) is the same root as "xenophobia"; Jesus inverts the natural fear. The Good Samaritan (Luke 10) is the parable of the welcome that crosses a national line; Jesus chose the moral hero from a despised foreign group. The early Christian theological tradition treated hospitality to the persecuted not as a charitable preference but as a duty owed to Christ himself in the person of the refugee.
Islam: The Quran identifies a specific class of believers honored for granting refuge — the Ansar, the "helpers" of Medina who took in the Prophet and his community when they fled persecution in Mecca (Quran 8:72, 9:100). The duty of asylum (aman) in classical Islamic law extends even to enemies who request it during conflict (9:6). The refugee's right to ask for protection is treated as a moral baseline that does not depend on the asker's status.
The honest counterweight: Religious traditions also accept that no nation can absorb every person who would prefer to live there, and that orderly entry serves both the host and the newcomer. The traditions' concern is not against immigration control as such; it is about whether the person fleeing persecution may even ask. A system that closes the door before the question is heard is a system that has refused the asking, not just the answer.
Constitutional & legal framework
The Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado (June 25, 2026) authorizes "metering" — daily caps that limit the number of asylum seekers who may even approach the inspection booth — by reading a single word of the asylum statute very narrowly.
The statutory text: Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. §1158) provides that "Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival) ... may apply for asylum." Congress wrote the parenthetical "whether or not at a designated port of arrival" precisely to ensure that the right to apply did not depend on the location of the asking. The statute also incorporates U.S. obligations under the 1967 Refugee Protocol, which prohibits returning a refugee to a country where they would face persecution (non-refoulement).
The ruling: Justice Alito's majority opinion holds that asylum seekers waiting at a port of entry on the Mexican side of the border have not yet "arrived" in the United States and so are not eligible to apply. The decision overturned lower-court orders that had blocked the metering practice. Justice Sotomayor's dissent, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, charged that the ruling "blesses the Executive Branch's decision to slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution, despite the detailed inspection and asylum system that Congress enacted and commands."
The interpretive move: The case turns on a word — "arrives." Congress, in 1980, used the phrase "physically present or who arrives" to broaden coverage to people in the act of presenting themselves at the border; reading "arrives" to require physical entry collapses the second clause into the first and makes the statute say, in effect, that only those who have crossed may ask whether they should be allowed to cross. The dissent's charge that the ruling rewrites the statute is the dissent's strongest point; the majority's response is that the executive has long had broad latitude to manage how applications are processed at ports of entry.
Due process and international law: The Refugee Convention's non-refoulement rule survives the decision as a matter of international obligation, but its domestic enforcement runs through statutes that the Court has now read narrowly. Whether someone turned back at the bridge is "returned" in the Convention sense — and whether U.S. courts can review claims of refoulement — are questions the ruling leaves to be litigated.
The honest other side: Border management is a real executive function, and a port of entry has finite processing capacity; some sequencing of arrivals is unavoidable. The majority's position is not that asylum is unavailable, but that it is unavailable until the asker is admitted. A reader who believes the executive branch must have substantial flexibility in border administration can fairly conclude the decision is within the bounds of statutory interpretation, even while acknowledging it is a far cry from what Congress arguably meant.
See: INA §208 (8 U.S.C. §1158) → | Refugee Protocol of 1967 (non-refoulement) → | Mullin v. Al Otro Lado opinion →
Sources cited:BibleQuranSupreme Court