US Supreme Court backs Trump policy on green card holder rights

The United States Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration in a case concerning the government’s power over green card holders, a blow to due-process protections for migrants with legal status.

The court’s conservative majority sided with the Trump administration on Tuesday in a case involving a lawful permanent resident of the US who was placed on immigration parole over criminal allegations upon reentering the country after a trip abroad.

The case centred on a green card holder, Muk Choi Lau, who was placed on immigration parole upon returning to the US from a trip to China in 2012 by an immigration officer because Lau had been accused of selling counterfeit clothing. Lau, who had not yet been convicted of a crime, argued that the agent overstepped their authority.

The court ruled 6-3 that the allegation of criminal wrongdoing was a sufficient reason for the border agent to place Lau on immigration parole.

“Border officers did not have the burden to establish by clear and convincing evidence that Lau had committed a crime involving moral turpitude,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the opinion.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed concern that the ruling would weaken due process protections from non-citizens with legal status in the country and leave people in “immigration limbo” before they had been convicted of any crime.

“I worry that the Court has now handed the Government a massive blank check,” Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by the court’s two other liberal judges.

The Trump administration has argued that suspicion of a crime is a sufficient reason to strip green card holders of their legal status and place them on immigration parole, part of a wider effort to roll back legal protections for migrants and expand the government’s deportation powers.