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In a decision that marks another major win for gun rights advocates across the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated a longstanding Hawaii regulation that prohibited permit-holding gun owners from bringing concealed handguns onto privately owned land open to the general public. The 6-3 ruling, issued Thursday, aligned the court’s conservative majority with gun owners who argued that the geographic restriction on legal firearm carry violated the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms.

Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Samuel Alito rejected the lower court’s reasoning that Hawaii had the authority to ban concealed-carry permit holders from entering common public-facing private spaces including shopping malls and dine-in restaurants unless they obtained explicit permission from the property owner. Alito emphasized that the regulation placed unreasonable, crippling limits on law-abiding Hawaii residents who had already completed the state’s strict screening and qualification requirements to receive a carry permit. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives,” Alito wrote in the opinion, concluding that “we hold that the law is unconstitutional.”

Critically, the court’s ruling only overturns the broad private property carry ban. It leaves intact all of Hawaii’s other existing gun restrictions, including prohibitions on carrying firearms in sensitive locations such as schools, government buildings, bars, public beaches, and public parks, according to reporting from CBS News, a media partner on the case’s coverage.

The legal challenge originated in 2023, when three Hawaii residents and the Hawaii Firearms Coalition filed suit against the regulation, arguing it violated Second Amendment rights. A federal district court initially ruled in the challengers’ favor, finding the rule most likely contravened the constitutional right to bear arms. But Hawaii state officials appealed the ruling, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later upheld the challenged law, setting the stage for the Supreme Court to take up the appeal.

The Hawaii regulation, often derisively called the “vampire rule” by gun rights supporters, required permit holders to request explicit permission from every private property owner before entering their land with a firearm. Even a routine stop to refuel a car or pick up groceries at a supermarket could leave a permit holder facing misdemeanor charges, which carried a maximum penalty of up to one year in prison. The former Trump administration threw its support behind the gun owners in the case, echoing arguments that the rule put legally authorized permit holders at unnecessary risk of criminal penalty for ordinary daily activities.

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected to have ripple effects beyond Hawaii, as four other heavily Democratic-leaning states — California, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland — maintain nearly identical restrictions on private property gun carry. Currently, most U.S. states already allow permit holders to carry concealed firearms on publicly accessible private property, so only a small handful of state regulations will be directly affected by this precedent. This ruling marks the second time during the Supreme Court’s current term that the court has ruled in favor of gun rights expansion, building on a series of recent decisions that have rolled back long-standing gun control regulations across the country. The court’s three liberal justices issued a joint dissent opposing the majority’s decision.

In a closely watched decision that will reshape how asylum claims are processed along the US-Mexico border, the Supreme Court has delivered a 6-3 ruling upholding the Trump administration’s long-debated ‘metering’ policy, which restricts asylum access for migrants who have not yet physically entered US territory. The decision ends a years-long legal battle and paves the way for the policy to be reimplemented, nearly four years after it was rolled back by the preceding Biden administration.

The core of the legal fight centered on interpreting a key line of US federal asylum law, which states that only migrants who have ‘arrived in the United States’ are eligible to apply for protection from persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds. The Trump administration has long argued that this language explicitly excludes asylum seekers stopped while still on the Mexican side of the border, a position that was rejected by a lower court before the case was appealed to the nation’s highest court.

Writing the majority opinion for the court’s conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito framed the question as a straightforward matter of common language interpretation. ‘In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place . . . before the person enters that place,’ Alito wrote. The ruling reverses the lower court’s finding that the metering policy was unlawful, in the case titled Noem v. Al Otro Lado, a prominent immigrant advocacy organization.

During oral arguments held in March, justices from both sides of the ideological spectrum pushed attorneys on both sides to clarify the legal threshold for what counts as ‘arriving in the US.’ Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett questioned what specific, dispositive marker would qualify a migrant as having arrived in the country, while fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch asked whether a migrant waiting in a queue at a port of entry, or standing at the water’s edge of the Rio Grande, would meet the standard.

Vivek Suri, an assistant solicitor general arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, told the court the answer was unambiguous: ‘You can’t arrive in the United States while you’re still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case.’ But Kelsi Corkran, an attorney from the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection representing the migrant plaintiffs, argued that migrants meet the arrival requirement once they reach the threshold of a port of entry, waiting to cross into the country.

The ‘metering’ policy gets its name from its core function: it allows US Customs and Border Protection officials to cap the number of asylum claims processed each day, citing limited staffing and overburdened processing systems as justification for turning away additional seekers. First introduced by the Trump administration in 2016, the policy was formally rescinded in 2021 when Democratic President Joe Biden took office. With Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, the administration moved to reinstate the policy, leading to the latest legal challenge that ended at the Supreme Court.

This ruling is not the final word on Trump’s broader border asylum agenda. Shortly after returning to office in 2025, Trump announced a separate, far more sweeping ban on asylum eligibility for most border arrivals, a policy that remains tied up in ongoing litigation and has yet to reach the Supreme Court.