The Supreme Court sent two big messages yesterday:

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The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump two major immigration victories on Thursday morning, both having to do with his administration's efforts to reduce asylum claims.

In the first case, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court held that migrants who are turned away at the border before entering the United States are not entitled to apply for asylum. In the second case, Mullin v. Doe, the court ruled that Haitian and Syrian nationals in the United States with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) could not receive judicial relief postponing the revocation of their status while they challenge the Trump administration’s efforts to revoke it in court.

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Writing the opinion in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, Justice Samuel Alito argued that a migrant who reaches the southern border but is turned away before entering has not, for legal purposes, "arrive[d] in" the United States. The holding is significant because current law provides that anyone who "arrives in the United States" has the right to apply for asylum.

"This case presents a straightforward question: whether an alien who seeks to enter the United States from Mexico ‘arrives in the United States’ when he or she is still in Mexico," Alito wrote. "In the decision below, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit answered ‘yes.’ That is wrong. 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."

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Also writing the opinion in Mullin v. Doe, Alito held that the law establishing TPS explicitly blocks recipients from legal relief unless their claims have a constitutional basis.

"In these cases, we consider whether respondents, who challenge the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for aliens from Syria and Haiti, are entitled to orders postponing the terminations during litigation," Alito wrote. "We hold that they are not."

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The first decision says that showing up at the border does not give you a ticket to enter the USA. The second one says that temporary does not mean permanent. In other words, you have to apply, enter the process and then we will decide whether or not we want you in the U.S. Once upon a time, we used to call this “immigration law.”

The temporary visas were issued to get around Congress, as simple as that. The Obama and Biden administrations knew that they didn't have the votes to allow illegals to enter and stay permanently. So they invented these "Temporary Protected Status" visas to bring people in. Everybody knew that they'd be permanent as soon as VP Harris made it so. Or they'd be made permanent by default, or by doing nothing about it until the next immigration reform law was passed.

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The showing up at the border scam did more to help human traffickers than anything else. People were paying to walk to the border and to cross it. That's not immigration. That's someone making money out of people misled by others.

So the court got it right, and we get back to having people respect immigration laws.

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Image: Kjetil Ree