The Supreme Court has authorized Donald Trump to condemn asylum seekers to persecution and death. Six justices have rewritten the meaning of asylum by reading the word “in” as if it required the foot to have crossed the threshold before the welcome is owed. Justice Sotomayor called it what it is. “The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’” This is not a triumph of textualism; it is a moral abdication disguised as grammar. You have taken the holy duty of sanctuary and reduced it to a semantic technicality. Two months after an appeals court blocked the suspension of asylum at the border, the highest court in the land has now handed you the final key to the lock.
The asylum officer will be standing there, trained and ready to do the inspection Congress ordered. The port of entry will have the capacity. The woman fleeing the gang that murdered her brother will be standing on the threshold. And the United States government will be permitted, by the highest court in the land, to turn her back toward the country she fled — to be persecuted, or killed. “Even if the asylum seeker is certain to be persecuted, or killed, if she is turned away,” Sotomayor wrote. The Court heard her. The Court ruled against her.
It is tempting to place the blame entirely on the men who drafted this opinion, but the machine that turns refugees away is older than this administration. The metering of migrants that began under the Obama era — when officials stood at international bridges and turned Haitian asylum seekers away from ports of entry — laid the groundwork, and a broader political consensus has long treated asylum not as a lifeline but as a loophole to be closed, even as the courts now allow the administration to fast-track deportations nationwide without a hearing. We who live in this country have allowed our fear to be legislated into cruelty, building a climate where a deputy secretary of state can call the protection of the persecuted a loophole without being laughed out of the room. I am a Catholic. I have watched my own bishops’ letters become things we cite in columns and forget by Sunday. The climate this Court is exploiting is one our own communities helped to build — by our silences, by our willingness to let the undocumented remain an abstraction, by our refusal to call the deportation officers by name. The Court has now ratified what every administration has done in some form. This is not a new cruelty. It is the cruelty of a system that has always known that the asylum right on paper could be denied in practice, and that has now been told by the highest court in the land that the denial is the law.
The same DHS that turns the persecuted back at the threshold now also exiles them to countries they have never known — third countries whose languages they do not speak, where no asylum officer has been trained to receive them, and where they are not citizens. That exile is not a procedural detail. It is the next sentence of the cruelty.
The Torah commands us to love the stranger and reminds us, again and again, that we were strangers in the land of Egypt. The commandment is repeated thirty-six times in the Jewish scriptures — more often than any other. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” The mechanism is the moral memory of having been refused. A people who remember being strangers remembers what it cost to be refused. The Court has just ruled that a nation with no such memory is permitted to refuse. You are stripping the memory of Egypt from the law, leaving only the architecture of the empire.
When Jesus spoke of the final judgment in Matthew’s Gospel, he did not ask if the refugee had managed to place her foot one inch across an invisible line, nor did he ask whether the nations had been correct in their interpretation of the statute. He sorted them as sheep and goats by a single criterion. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The criterion is not citizenship. It is not the location of the foot. “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” The Court has just ruled that the welcome is owed only after the foot crosses the threshold. Read the verse again. The verse does not say that. By blessing the turnback, you are answering him with your grammar, claiming that the stranger never actually arrived.
Pope Francis named a posture like this one the globalization of indifference — a willingness to look at the suffering of others and say it is not our business. Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, compared this ruling to the tragedy of the St. Louis, the ship carrying Jewish refugees turned away from our shores just before the Holocaust, half of whom were ultimately murdered. The parallel is not merely historical; it is a mirror held up to our present. When you decide that the definition of arrival matters more than the certainty of persecution, you are deciding that human beings can be sacrificed to preserve a legal fiction.
Archbishop Romero, the night before they killed him, told the soldiers of his country in plain language what their orders required of them. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.” He did not soften the order. He gave it in three verbs — I beg, I beseech, I order — and in his own voice as Archbishop. The soldiers were not strangers to the people they were ordered to kill. They were their same brother peasants. The door of return was open. The order was not soft. So it is with the deportation officers stationed at the ports of entry now. They are our brothers and sisters. The order they have been given is wrong. The door of return is open.
The American Catholic bishops said in 2003, with their Mexican counterparts, that the human rights and human dignity of undocumented migrants should be respected. They have said it again and again, and our country has heard them and proceeded. What a humane asylum system requires is not a mystery. It requires ports of entry open to those who arrive at them. It requires asylum officers trained and present to do the inspections Congress commanded. It requires that a woman certain to be persecuted or killed if turned away not be turned away. It requires that the Refugee Act of 1980 mean what it says. The door of return is open. The Court can reconsider. The administration can stop.
In 1939 a ship called the St. Louis sailed back across the Atlantic with its Jewish passengers, because the United States would not let them land. About half of those who were returned to continental Europe were killed. Justice Sotomayor invoked the ship in her dissent. The Court did not need to. We remember. To the justices who wrote this opinion, and to the officials who will enforce it, I say: put down the grammar of exclusion, walk out to the threshold, and open the gate. The asylum seeker is already here, waiting in the dust, and the Christ you claim to serve is waiting with her. The door is still open.