Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision Wednesday directing federal appeals courts to defer to immigration judges when reviewing asylum rulings. The decision strengthens the executive branch’s authority in immigration matters and comes as the Trump administration continues its deportation push.
Jackson wrote that federal courts must apply a “substantial evidence” standard when reviewing an immigration judge’s findings about whether a migrant would face persecution if deported, Fox News reported.
She said the law requires courts to uphold those findings unless the evidence clearly compels a different conclusion.
“The agency’s determination … is generally ‘conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary,’” Jackson wrote.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, migrants who enter the United States without documentation can apply for asylum.
Immigration judges, who work within the Department of Justice, evaluate those claims and determine whether asylum should be granted or whether the migrant should be deported.
Migrants can appeal those decisions to the Board of Immigration Appeals. The board is also part of the executive branch. From there, cases can be appealed to federal circuit courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court.
The ruling in Urias Orellana v. Bondi held that courts must largely defer to immigration judges’ findings about whether a migrant would face persecution if removed from the United States.
The case involved Douglas Humberto Urias Orellana and his wife and child, who are citizens of El Salvador.
The family entered the United States illegally in 2021 and applied for asylum. An immigration judge denied their asylum claim and ordered their removal.
The Board of Immigration Appeals and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit both upheld the decision.
Urias Orellana argued that a sicario, or hitman, had targeted him since 2016 after shooting two of his half-brothers and threatening to kill other family members.
The immigration judge found his testimony credible. However, the judge determined that the incidents described did not establish a valid fear of future persecution.
The Supreme Court reviewed whether the 1st Circuit had properly examined the immigration judge’s ruling.
The justices concluded that the appeals court correctly relied on the immigration judge’s findings.
This week, the Court also allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to remove the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, supporting the Republican president’s push to increase deportations.
The court stayed the order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that halted the administration’s move to end the immigration “parole” granted to 532,000 of these migrants by former President Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to immediate removal while the case is heard in lower courts.
The ruling was unsigned and did not justify, as is common with emergency court orders. Two of the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, officially dissented.
Immigration parole is a type of temporary authorization granted by American law to enter the nation for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” which allows grantees to live and work in the United States. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s strategy for deterring illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20, his first day back in office, calling for the elimination of humanitarian parole programs. The Department of Homeland Security then attempted to terminate them in March, shortening the two-year parole awards. The government said that revoking parole would make it simpler to place migrants in an “expedited removal” procedure.
The lawsuit is one of many that the Trump administration has filed urgently with the nation’s highest court, seeking to overturn judgments by lower courts that hinder his sweeping plans, including those targeting immigration.