A “disturbing” Supreme Court ruling will allow border officials to subject green-card holders to a “Kafkaesque nightmare,” per a Slate analysis.
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According to the analysis by legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern, the 6-3 Supreme Court vote along usual partisan lines in the case Blanche v. Lau established that border officials don’t need “clear and convincing evidence” that green-card holders committed a “crime of moral turpitude” to deny them entry.
The case originates from a lawful permanent resident named Muk Choi Lau, who lost his green card and was paroled into the U.S. after he was accused of selling designer-style shorts with a counterfeit trademark, Stern wrote. Lau argued that the border official shouldn’t be able to take his green card and have so much discretion.
Although a lower court agreed with Lau, the Supreme Court tossed that decision with a ruling that Stern described as “egregiously wrong.”
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Lau was allowed into the United States on parole, but that status puts an immigrant in “legal limbo” and makes them “far more vulnerable to deportation.”
Stern brought up Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion and echoed her point that by taking a legal permanent resident’s green card, it can make it harder for them “to work, open bank accounts, secure housing, obtain health insurance, and enroll in school.”
Meanwhile, Stern called out Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion, saying it “blesses one part of the Trump administration’s multipronged attack against green-card holders, validating its campaign to revoke these individuals’ rights on a whim,” and highlighted that Thomas “expressly declined to say what, if any, burden the government bears at the border.”
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