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On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case that weakens protections for permanent residents, in the latest attack on legal immigration to the United States.
In a 6-3 decision, the Court gave the government more flexibility to make permanent residents who have been accused of a crime vulnerable for detention and removal when reentering the U.S. The decision that border officers can treat permanent residents as “applicants for admission” rather than already admitted to the country, even without “clear and convincing evidence” that they have committed a crime. This means that they could be refused entry or detained without first being proved guilty.
The case centered on a lawful permanent resident, Muk Choi Lau, who was placed on immigration parole after returning from a short trip to China because he had been accused of a counterfeiting crime. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that border officials did not have to establish evidence that Lau had committed a crime to place him on immigration parole.
The decision was approved by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito – the conservative majority of the Supreme Court.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissenting opinion, signed on by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. In it, she wrote that lawful permanent residents “are as close to citizenship as one can get absent naturalization,” which means that they are allowed to “travel in and out of the United States” with more ease than other non-citizens.
This decision, she says, undermines “the benefits and security that come with having a green card,” allowing the government to first consider permanent residents as “seeking admission” “and justify the applicability of the exception later.”
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“Congress could not have meant for the guarantees it was affording to be so cavalierly swept aside,” Jackson wrote.
The Court’s “massive blank check” to the White House may cause permanent residents to spend “years in legal limbo… or worse, in detention” as they work to prove their innocence.
Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court narrowed the ability of non-U.S. citizens to bring forward lawsuits over human rights violations committed abroad. The Court stated that members of the Falun Gong religious movement cannot sue a U.S. company that they say helped facilitate the Chinese state’s detention and torture of their members. While the ruling focused on Cisco Systems, a U.S. technology company, the ruling could prevent other U.S. companies from facing cases relating to human rights abuses abroad.
Sotomayor said that the decision throws out “two decades of settled precedent,” closing the Court’s doors “to virtually every future litigant seeking redress for a violation of international law” under the Alien Tort Statute, which was passed in 1789 to allow non-U.S. citizens to file lawsuits in U.S. courts for international law violations.
The court is also considering Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, as well as cases determining whether state bans on transgender athletes will continue, both of which it is set to decide on by the end of June.
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