In late March I sat in the Supreme Court gallery for the first time. For three decades I’ve done street-level anti-poverty and solidarity work: vigils, protests, even an arrest for praying on the Court’s steps in 2018. But nothing prepared me for seeing the nine justices up close as attorneys argued Noem v. Al Otro Lado — the most consequential asylum case in years.
I was there with immigrant-rights lawyers whose clients challenge a 2018 policy that effectively barred people who arrive at ports of entry on the U.S.–Mexico line from setting foot on U.S. soil to ask for asylum. My organization, the Kairos Center, helped organize an interfaith amicus brief representing dozens of faith bodies — Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Native traditions and more — all affirming a shared moral obligation to shelter the persecuted.
On paper, the dispute looks technical: does an executive turnback practice known as “metering” contravene long-established law requiring the government to inspect and process people who seek admission at official crossings? But the stakes are plain and human. For many years U.S. law and practice required officials to conduct inspections at ports of entry so asylum claims could be considered before anyone was returned to danger. Under metering, border agents physically stopped people at the barrier and refused them entry, leaving families and children stranded for months or years in dangerous Mexican border towns. Immigrant-rights lawyers argue the practice contradicts decades of statutory and administrative precedent; critics say it condemns vulnerable people to harm.
Although the Ninth Circuit declared the policy unlawful in 2024 and metering was not in official effect in recent years, the current administration asked the Supreme Court to review the case. If the Court gives the government a green light, the Department of Homeland Security would have stronger legal cover to turn away thousands — perhaps many more — at the border. That could clear the way for broader closures, deepen an already punitive immigration regime, and further normalize a politics of exclusion.
This case comes alongside other efforts this term that seek to reshape the rights of people in this country — efforts to erode birthright citizenship and other protections. Taken together, they suggest a judicial willingness to endorse expansive executive power and to permit policies that disproportionately harm marginalized people.
What surprised and unsettled me in the courtroom was not only what the government asked for, but the tone of the questioning. The court’s conservative justices spent long stretches seeming bored or cavalier, fixated on hairline textual questions rather than the consequences for human life. They drilled counsel on the meaning of words like “arrive,” as though parsing semantics absolved them of grappling with the moral and historical commitments behind asylum law.
The physical setting only deepened the ironies. The gallery is dominated by marble friezes sculpted a century ago, populated by “great lawgivers” and religious figures — Moses, Confucius, Solomon — alongside Roman emperors and ancient jurists whose names evoke harshness. Looking at those images I thought about the long cultural and religious lineage that gave birth to asylum practices: sanctuary traditions in churches and temples, laws in many faiths that command care for strangers, and a civic history in this country that has often, imperfectly, been shaped by providing refuge to the persecuted.
Our interfaith brief stressed that asylum isn’t some recent policy preference; it emerges from a cross-cultural and religious inheritance that insists societies protect those who flee persecution. The United States’ asylum regime, in many respects, is the legal codification of that moral commitment. To let executive acts nullify statutory safeguards would be both unlawful and a betrayal of that tradition.
There is a haunting historical touchstone here: the SS St. Louis, the German liner in 1939 that carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees to Cuba and then to the United States only to be turned away and sent back to Europe — a decision that led, for many aboard, to death in Nazi camps. At a pre-hearing news event, a border-rights advocate put the point plainly: asylum is not a matter of convenience or line management. You cannot tell someone fleeing torture or sexual violence to wait indefinitely in harm’s way because the state finds their arrival inconvenient. That is the moral core of the case.
Faith leaders who gathered on the Court’s steps that morning made this moral argument public: across traditions, welcoming the stranger is not ancillary doctrine but central commandment. The vigils happened during a holy season when Muslims, Jews, Christians and others were observing Ramadan, Passover and Easter; the rituals of remembrance and liberation made the plea vivid and shared. Religious texts and teachings — from the Torah’s injunctions to Jesus’s commands to norms within Islamic jurisprudence, Hindu and Buddhist ethics, and Indigenous traditions — repeatedly emphasize protection of the vulnerable.
The government’s lawyers sought to reduce the debate to procedural start points: when does protection begin, what does “arrive” mean for the purpose of a statute. Those technical frames, however, masked what is at stake: whether the United States remains a place where people fleeing persecution can reasonably seek protection, or whether the country will permit executive measures to nullify protections that Congress and precedent put in place.
Sitting in that courtroom I kept returning to another line, from George Washington, who once wrote he had hoped this land would become “a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind.” If the Court abandons the protection that asylum embodies, that hope becomes harder to justify.
But the story does not end at the bench. Outside the chambers, there are people organizing, praying, protesting and litigating. The coalition opposing the turnback policy calls itself No Turning Back — an apt name. Movements that connect struggles across poverty, housing, health care, criminalization, war and migration will be essential to push back against policies that single out the most vulnerable.
For those of us who work in religious and grassroots communities, the case is a reminder that law and moral conviction must travel together. If the law is stripped of its humane content, religious and civic communities will still need to bear witness: providing shelter, advocacy and care where the state withdraws it. And politically, we must hold institutions to account so that legal language does not become an alibi for cruelty.
Either we preserve a society where everyone — including the stranger who seeks safety — has recourse to justice, or we drift toward a polity that reserves rights for some and denies them to others. The urgent decision before the Court will test whether this country honors its legal and moral commitments. For my part, the answer to that test lies not only in judges’ opinions but in what people choose to do afterward: keep moving forward, keep insisting on protection, and never turn back.