Sen. Cruz Brief Prompts Supreme Court to Review Ninth Circuit Asylum Decision

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights, filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn a Ninth Circuit ruling. The ruling held that an illegal alien stopped on the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border is deemed to have "arrived in the United States," despite never physically entering the country. The decision to review this case by the U.S. Supreme Court comes after Sen. Cruz led a cert-stage brief last year.

Excerpts from the amicus brief are below, and the full text of the brief can be viewed here.

"The Biden Administration invited chaos at the border by abandoning metering in November 2021. By May 2023, border processing facilities had 'reach[ed] overcapacity.' The system was overwhelmed. At one point, the Biden Administration lost track of nearly 85,000 sponsored alien children, underscoring a systemic inability to manage migration at the scale the Biden Administration was facilitating.

"The Ninth Circuit's ruling below, if not reversed, will entrench that chaos by barring the executive branch from utilizing metering to pace the flow of aliens into the United States. In doing so, that court badly misconstrued plain statutory text, usurped the policymaking authority of the political branches, granted millions of aliens a right to seek asylum never authorized by Congress, and made a hash of other provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

"At every turn, the Ninth Circuit's decision defies text and common sense, and-if not reversed-it will yield untold chaos at the southern border."