SCOTUS: Courts Must Defer To Immigration Judges On Asylum

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously sided with the Trump administration on Wednesday in a dispute over the standard for reviewing the cases of illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States.

“We granted certiorari to determine whether the Court of Appeals applied the appropriate standard of review under the [Immigration and Nationality Act] INA. We conclude that the statute requires application of the substantial-evidence standard to the agency’s conclusion that a given set of undisputed facts does not constitute persecution. Accordingly, we affirm,” Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court.

Known as Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, the case centers around Salvadoran national Humberto Urias-Orellana, who fled his country alongside his family and illegally entered the United States in 2021 after reportedly facing violence in El Salvador. After being designated for removal by federal officials, Urias-Orellana sought asylum under the argument that he and his family faced persecution in El Salvador — claims which were rejected by an immigration judge (IJ).

The immigration judge’s determinations that the alleged violence Urias-Orellana faced did not amount to persecution, and therefore, he did not qualify for asylum, were later affirmed by the Board of Immigration Appeals and the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. (Immigration judges and the BIA fall under the executive branch.)

Writing for the court, Jackson noted that while the courts of appeals “apply varying standards to the agency’s persecution determination,” the Supreme Court has “already concluded that these determinations receive substantial evidence review.” (As described by Cornell Law School, substantial evidence review is used by appellate courts to “to review an administrative agency’s actions” and “look to the entire existing administrative record and ask whether it contains evidence sufficient to support the agency’s factual determinations.”)

Put another way, the high court ruled that the factual findings by the executive’s immigration courts on whether an asylum seeker’s persecution claims satisfy the INA’s persecution standard should receive deference from the judicial branch.

“With their focus on the metaphorical trees, we think petitioners have missed the forest. It is certainly true that the required persecution determination turns on more than just the facts: The INA’s legal standard for ‘persecution’ must be applied to the IJ’s findings of fact,” Jackson wrote. “But [our precedents] and the subsequent statutory history suggest that Congress meant for the entirety of this kind of ‘mixed’ determination — including both the IJ’s factual findings and the application of the statute to those findings — to receive deference under [federal law].”

The court concluded that the 1st Circuit “applied the appropriate standard” under the law “when it reviewed the agency persecution determination for substantial evidence.” As such, Jackson surmised, the appellate court’s rejection of Urias-Orellana’s petition “is affirmed.”