The online magazine The Federalist rightly called the decision an “immigration rebuke,” but the author was mistaken when he wrote that Asencio-Cordero “was denied a visa by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2015”—visa decisions overseas are made by consular officers, who are commissioned Foreign Service officers in the State Department.

The Muñoz case was the latest round in a battle by immigration activists against the doctrine of “consular non-reviewability,” which holds that decisions made by consular officers overseas in visa cases can’t be challenged in U.S. courts. If they were, the system would crumble—much like the asylum system has under President Joe Biden’s flood of released and paroled inadmissible aliens.