Supreme Court Sides With Trump Administration in Dispute Over Green Card Reentry

The U.S. Supreme Court on June 23 ruled 6–3 that immigration authorities were legally justified in refusing to formally admit into the country a Chinese citizen with a U.S. green card who had been charged with counterfeiting.

The legal issue in the highly technical case of Blanche v. Lau is whether the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) correctly classified the man as inadmissible because of a pending criminal charge. A lawful permanent resident of the United States since September 2007, the respondent, Muk Choi Lau, returned to the country in June 2012 after a trip to his native China.

The government-issued residency document issued to lawful permanent residents is colloquially called a green card.

Lau had been charged in May 2012 with violating New Jersey law by engaging in third-degree trademark counterfeiting.

Upon returning to the United States, he presented himself as a lawful permanent resident, but U.S. immigration authorities noted the pending charge and declined to formally admit him to the country. Instead, they granted him parole with deferred inspection, meaning he was allowed into the country subject to a later decision on his immigration status.

This placed Lau in a kind of immigration limbo, in which he retained his lawful permanent resident status but with a heightened vulnerability to removal from the country.

Lau was convicted of counterfeiting in June 2013 and sentenced to two years of probation. In March 2014, DHS moved to deport him, saying that he had been ineligible for admission in June 2012 because when he reentered the country, he had committed “a crime involving moral turpitude.”

An offense involving moral turpitude is a serious crime, such as murder, counterfeiting, fraud, forgery, rape, kidnapping, embezzlement, robbery, or drug trafficking.

The U.S. Department of Justice argued that an offense involving moral turpitude is a serious crime sufficient to warrant deportation and obtained a removal order against Lau based on his conviction.

In March 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the deportation order. That court held that the existence of a pending criminal charge does not provide the clear and convincing evidence of a crime of moral turpitude needed for a DHS official at an airport to deem him a readmission applicant who could be paroled into the country.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the high court’s majority opinion in the case.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissented.

In his opinion, Thomas said the government was justified in treating Lau as an applicant for admission and charging him with inadmissibility.

“Nothing in the [Immigration and Nationality Act] required the border officer to have clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude before deeming him an applicant for admission,” the justice said.

“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 in Board of Immigration Appeals precedent.

The government may treat “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,” Thomas said.

The high court refrained from ruling on Lau’s argument that his crime did not involve moral turpitude, and left it to the Second Circuit to decide the issue when it reexamines the case on remand.

In her dissenting opinion, which Sotomayor and Kagan joined, Jackson said the Immigration and Nationality Act “plainly provides a default rule regarding the Government’s admission of an [lawful permanent resident] returning home from travels abroad.”

Unlike other noncitizens, a lawful permanent resident “shall not be regarded as seeking an admission into the United States,” she said, quoting a section in the act.

“This is a clear directive. In practical terms, it means that a border officer ‘shall not’ require [a lawful permanent resident] to (re)prove that he satisfies the standard admission criteria upon his return to the United States.”

“Congress’s use of the phrase ‘shall not’ leaves the Government no discretion to divest [a lawful permanent resident] of his already-admitted status and treat him as ‘seeking an admission’ if he does not fit into one of the six exceptions” in the Immigration and Nationality Act, Jackson said.

The majority opinion undermines the act “as well as the benefits and security that come with having a green card,” she said.

Jackson said she is worried that the court “has now handed the Government a massive blank check.”

With the new decision, which allows the government to return a lawful permanent resident to “seeking an admission” status upon arriving at the border, the government is allowed to demonstrate later that the individual was eventually convicted, she said.

“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.”