The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave border officers more room to block some green-card holders from reentering the United States, ruling 6-3 in Blanche v. Lau that they do not need clear and convincing evidence before treating a returning lawful permanent resident as an applicant for admission. The decision means officers can deny entry, detain the person, or let them in only on parole.
That matters now because the case turns on what happens when someone who has lived in the United States with a green card leaves and comes back. Muk Choi Lau did that in 2012 after a trip to China, only to be stopped by a border officer who refused to formally admit him, took his green card and paroled him into the country. He had also faced criminal charges in 2012 for selling designer-style shorts with a counterfeit trademark, and the officer said he had committed a crime involving moral turpitude.
Lawful permanent residents are generally not supposed to seek admission anew each time they return from travel abroad. But federal law allows the government to treat a resident who has committed a crime involving moral turpitude as an alien seeking admission rather than someone already admitted, and the majority used that framework to side with the Trump administration. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in dissent that the court had handed the government a massive blank check.
What the court did not settle may prove just as important as what it did. Thomas declined to say what burden, if any, the government must meet at the border before making that call, leaving a gap in a case that otherwise broadens the power to turn a green-card holder’s return into parole-based legal limbo. For Lau, and for others in the same position, the immediate lesson is blunt: a green card no longer guarantees that coming home will mean being admitted.
