Green Card holders can be denied reentry into the United States even if border officers have no solid proof they have committed a crime, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 23.
The 6-3 ruling in Blanche v. Lau held that border agents are not required to prove “clear and convincing evidence” that lawful permanent residents returning to the U.S. broke the law in order to deny them reentry.
Clarence Thomas
“The Immigration and Nationality Act does not impose that requirement,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.
“Congress could not have meant for the guarantees it was affording to be so cavalierly swept aside,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson responded for the minority. “By law, (lawful permanent residents) are as close to citizenship as one can get absent naturalization. Today, the majority ignores that crucial fact and empowers government officials to act accordingly.”
The ruling came in the case of Muk Choi Lau, a Chinese national and Green Card holder charged in 2012 with trademark counterfeiting in New Jersey a month before traveling to China. Upon his return, he was denied lawful permanent status and granted entry on parole, instead.
The U.S. initiated removal proceedings a year later after Lau pleaded guilty to the counterfeiting charges. Authorities claimed his offense fit the definition of a “crime of moral turpitude” under the INA. Lau fought the determination and won at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The Supreme Court vacated that decision with its ruling.
“We decline to read into the INA an additional clear-and-convincing-evidence burden on border officers entrusted with making ‘quick judgments on the spot’ when that burden is nowhere in the statute or even broad precedent,” Thomas wrote. “We conclude that the government properly charged Lau with inadmissibility. Border officers did not have the burden to establish by clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude.”
The majority also did not agree with Lau’s argument that a Green Card holder should not be denied entry into the country until convicted of the crime of moral turpitude, Thomas said. “A straightforward reading of the text contradicts Lau’s interpretation” because “the government may regard a lawful permanent resident as seeking admission as soon as he ‘committed a crime involving moral turpitude ‘even if (as in Lau’s case) the conviction occurred’ later.”
Ketanji Brown Jackson
But Jackson countered that the immigration act does not permit the government to deny a Green Card holder’s re-ntry into the country without firm evidence to support its action: “The government needs to have the requisite certainty about the applicability of the crime-involving-moral-turpitude exception at the border, before it decides that the statute’s default requirement for admission of (lawful permanent residents) does not apply.”
Instead, the court’s decision violates the “fundamental maxim in our country that all are innocent until proven guilty,” Jackson said. “Lau’s indictment alone was insufficient to establish by ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that he had already ‘committed’ a crime involving moral turpitude.”
Jackson added the ruling gives federal authorities too much discretion in how they treat legal permanent residents at the border: “I worry that the court has now handed the government a massive blank check. With today’s decision, the court allows the government to return an LPR to the status of ‘seeking an admission’ upon his entry at the border, so long as the government is able to show later that he was eventually convicted.’”