The Supreme Court just redefined what it means to be heartless.

The Supreme Court just redefined what it means to be heartless. It held that immigration authorities can keep asylum seekers away from the border and by doing so will never have to process their claims that they are going to be killed if they go back to their home countries. The majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito is a case study in why critics since Jesus of Nazareth himself have been condemning legalism. The law says that if an immigrant arrives in the United States that person is entitled to an asylum hearing. The conservative justices, however held that the word "arrives in" means you have to actually set foot inside the United States. If you just come to the border and ask for entrance you don't get that asylum consideration. This is a bad interpretation of the law for lots of reasons. First of all, you can "arrive" somewhere without actually literally entering there. Second, the law creates perverse incentives as the court has interpreted it. If you sneak into the United States in violation of the law, you can bring an asylum claim. But if you go to the border the way you're supposed to and ask for admission they can block you from ever making it. Most fundamentally though the spirit of the asylum law is to give everybody who's in danger of life or limb the opportunity to flee and be protected. Modern asylum law came into existence after World War II and the Holocaust. It was inspired by cases like the ship St. Louis which sailed from Europe with 900 refugee passengers and was unable to land in the United States. They had to send the ship back to Europe and a meaningful number of those there eventually perished under the Nazis. Asylum law exists to guarantee that nobody is ever put in that situation again. Pretty obviously if people are seeking protection for their lives they come to the edge of the United States and they're sent back they are not getting that protection. In fact, the people on the St. Louis itself according to this law as now interpreted would not have had the opportunity to make asylum claims themselves. Law is not supposed to be a game of technicalities. Law is a system of rules and values designed to give effect to the principles of justice that underlie them. When it comes to the law of asylum that spirit could not be clearer. The point of asylum law is to provide protection to vulnerable oppressed people who are fleeing for their lives. Today, the Supreme Court crushed that spirit. That's bad for law itself. That's bad for the United States. And it's bad for the world.