After yet another 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that handed Donald Trump’s administration one more victory, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called out her conservative colleagues over their betrayal of existing green card holders.
According to The Independent, the ruling came down in Blanche v. Lau, which agrees with the administration that, if a green card holder leaves the U.S. and then returns, a border official can arbitrarily declare they may have committed a possible crime and therefore can revoke and confiscate their green card without evidence, putting them in a “legal limbo.” The case centered on Muk Choi Lau, a lawful permanent resident who returned from a short trip to China in 2012. A border officer placed him on immigration parole after he was accused of counterfeiting crimes. Lau later pleaded guilty to selling counterfeit clothes in New Jersey, but argued the officer had overstepped authority in triggering deportation proceedings, the report notes. The conservative majority Supreme Court disagreed, with Thomas reasoning that, “Border officers did not have the burden to establish by clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude.” Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, unleashed a fierce counterattack, writing that the majority’s ruling “cavalierly swept aside” the rights of green card holders and handed the government a “massive blank check” to rewrite immigration law as it sees fit at the moment. The decision allows the government to upend a green card holder’s status upon return to the U.S. “so long as the government is able to show later that he was eventually convicted,” Jackson noted— calling it an astonishing reversal of the “burden of proof” standard. “That sequencing undermines the plain terms and basic operation of the relevant statutory scheme, which guarantees that lawful permanent residents will not be ‘regarded as seeking an admission’ at the border unless certain exceptions apply,” she added.
Even if a person is ultimately acquitted and the government’s deportation attempt is thrown out, those decisions offer only “cold comfort” to the green card holder, “who by then might have spent years in legal limbo (with only the protection of a temporary green card) or worse, in detention,” she then warned.
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