A foundational misreading of how Congress structured the immigration system may have driven the Supreme Court toward a ruling that hands border officers sweeping, largely unchecked power to deny migrants any chance at asylum — so argue legal scholars who have parsed both the statute and the majority opinion in last week's Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision.
At the heart of the critique is what Justice Samuel Alito left out. Writing for the majority, Alito described expedited removal — the fast-track procedure that bypasses an immigration judge — as the default fate for most inadmissible arrivals. The actual statute he cited tells a narrower story: that accelerated deportation pathway applies only to migrants who either misrepresented a material fact or showed up without valid travel documents. Anyone who expresses fear for their safety is excepted from expedited removal, and anyone swept up in it faces a minimum five-year bar on returning to the United States.
Jonathan Weinberg, Distinguished Professor of Law at Wayne State University, spoke to the practical stakes. "Justice Alito's statement would take away from people seeking to enter the country — and some people already in it — their only opportunity to have their case heard by a neutral adjudicator,