{"id":256,"date":"2026-06-23T22:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=256"},"modified":"2026-06-23T22:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T22:13:11","slug":"clarence-thomas-just-gave-border-agents-a-terrifying-new-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=256","title":{"rendered":"Clarence Thomas Just Gave Border Agents a Terrifying New Power"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is part of <\/em>Opinionpalooza<\/em>, Slate\u2019s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court. Keep up with all of our Supreme Court coverage and analysis by <\/em>signing up for weekly email roundups<\/em>. The best way to support our work\u2014and unlock exclusive legal analysis\u2014is by joining <\/em>Slate Plus<\/em>. (If you are already a member, consider a <\/em>donation<\/em> or <\/em>merch<\/em>!)<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Did Donald Trump Use His Office to Get a Powerful New Weight Loss Drug?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Imagine you are a law-abiding green-card holder returning to the United States after visiting your parents abroad. At the border, you expect an easy entry; after all, as a lawful permanent resident, you generally do not need to seek admission anew each time you return from travel abroad. But when you present your documents to a border officer, he accuses you of committing a crime. You deny the accusation, because it is untrue, but the officer doesn\u2019t care. He confiscates your green card and refuses to recognize that you are a lawful resident who has already been admitted to the U.S. Now he holds your fate in his hands: He can send you into detention or turn you away altogether. In the best-case scenario, he may \u201cparole\u201d you into the country as an \u201carriving alien\u201d\u2014forcing you into a legal limbo that makes you far more vulnerable to deportation and could stretch on indefinitely. All without the officer offering persuasive evidence that you committed a crime.<\/p>\n

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On Tuesday, the Supreme Court blessed this Kafkaesque nightmare by a 6\u20133 vote along the usual partisan lines. Justice Clarence Thomas\u2019 majority opinion in declared that officers do not need \u201cclear and convincing evidence\u201d that a green-card holder committed \u201ca crime of moral turpitude\u201d before treating them as an \u201capplicant for admission\u201d who may be denied entry, detained, or (at best) conditionally allowed back in on parole. Indeed, Thomas expressly declined to say what, if any, burden the government bears at the border\u2014an ambiguity that the Trump administration will surely exploit to throw green-card holders into deportation limbo. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explained in dissent, \u201cthe court has now handed the government a massive blank check\u201d to hollow out \u201cthe benefits and security that come with having a green card.\u201d<\/p>\n

The origins of Tuesday\u2019s case illustrate its stakes. In 2012, a green-card holder named Muk Choi Lau returned to the United States after a trip to China. At that time, he faced criminal charges for selling designer-style shorts with a counterfeit trademark. As a lawful permanent resident, or LPR, Lau would typically be let into the country without hassle, deemed \u201calready admitted\u201d rather than \u201cseeking admission.\u201d But a border officer noticed the pending criminal charges and refused to formally admit him. Instead\u2014playing prosecutor, judge, and jury\u2014the officer deemed Lau to have committed \u201ca crime involving moral turpitude.\u201d And federal law permits the government to treat a lawful permanent resident who has committed such a crime as an \u201calien seeking admission\u201d rather than someone already admitted to the country. The officer invoked this exception against Lau, snatching his green card and \u201cparoling\u201d him into the country. That move made Lau far more vulnerable to detention and deportation than if he had been admitted as an LPR.<\/p>\n

Lau argued that Congress could not have intended to give individual border agents such vast discretion to upend the lives of green-card holders. He asserted that the government bore the burden of proving that a lawful permanent resident had committed a crime of moral turpitude before it confiscated someone\u2019s green card at the border and plunged them into deportation purgatory. A lower court agreed, holding that the government had to prove, by \u201cclear and convincing evidence,\u201d that the individual committed this kind of offense.<\/p>\n

Thomas tossed out that decision on Tuesday in an opinion that turns Congress\u2019 statutory scheme on its head. To see why he is so egregiously wrong, first consider what the law in question actually says. It first lays out protections afforded to LPRs, declaring that they \u201cshall not\u201d be compelled to prove that they satisfy the requirements for legal entry \u201cunless\u201d one of six exceptions applies. So, as Jackson wrote in dissent, the \u201cdefault rule\u201d is that an LPR retains the ordinary rights of a permanent resident at the border. The government may abridge those rights only by establishing that the LPR fits within one of the exceptions.<\/p>\n

Read more The U.K. Felled Its Sixth Prime Minister in 10 Years. Our Own Trump Is Creeping Closer.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAs a matter of logic,\u201d Jackson wrote, this \u201csequence\u201d puts the burden on the border officer to justify departure from the \u201cdefault presumption.\u201d That burden need not necessarily be \u201cclear and convincing evidence.\u201d It might instead be something lower, like probable cause. But the government must satisfy some<\/em> meaningful evidentiary standard at the border before it may override the default rule and strip an LPR of the protections of permanent residency.<\/p>\n

Now consider Thomas\u2019 distortion of the congressional scheme. In his telling, the government may simply accuse an LPR of committing a crime, strip them of the protections that ordinarily come with permanent residency, and then spend years gathering the evidence needed to retroactively justify that decision. It need only prove its accusation to an immigration judge much later, and that proof somehow backfills the evidence the officer lacked at the border. Thomas would not even say that border officers bear any <\/em>burden of proof before consigning LPRs to this legal purgatory, and he left open the possibility that they have no such burden at all. That would mean that an officer could simply invent an accusation of criminality, leaving the green-card holder trapped in a bureaucratic twilight zone for years before they have a chance to rebut the accusation at a hearing.<\/p>\n

And that twilight zone has serious costs\u2014a fact that Thomas ignores but Jackson rightly highlights. Without a permanent green card, it is harder for legal permanent residents \u201cto work, open bank accounts, secure housing, obtain health insurance, and enroll in school,\u201d Jackson noted. It is also easier for the government to deport them. A typical green-card holder may not be removed unless the government proves they\u2019re deportable. An LPR in Lau\u2019s situation, by contrast, bears the burden of proving in immigration court that they are entitled to remain. Moreover, a single conviction for a crime of moral turpitude can be enough to expel an LPR in Lau\u2019s position, even when that same conviction would not be enough to deport a green-card holder who had been formally admitted. They may even be detained for months or years while their case grinds through immigration court.<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019 opinion blesses one part of the Trump administration\u2019s multipronged attack against green-card holders, validating its campaign to revoke these individuals\u2019 rights on a whim. This is the same administration that is making it as difficult as possible for immigrants around the world to get approval for green cards and arbitrarily detaining many who already have them. Worse, the administration has argued that Immigration and Customs Enforcement may detain green-card holders with certain criminal convictions for months or years without any opportunity to seek release on bond while the government pursues their deportation in immigration court. As Slate\u2019s Alexis Romero wrote last week, the Supreme Court just took up a case testing the legality of that extraordinary claim. Its decision in Lau <\/em>does not inspire confidence that the conservative supermajority will afford LPRs their due process rights.<\/p>\n

Indeed, what\u2019s ultimately so disturbing about Tuesday\u2019s decision isn\u2019t just the holding. (The majority did not decide whether Lau\u2019s offense even constitutes a crime of moral turpitude, leaving that to the lower court, so he may still evade deportation.) What\u2019s genuinely alarming is the broader indifference, if not hostility, that it reflects toward green-card holders. These individuals hold a special protected status just one rung below citizenship, having already proved their right to live and work in the U.S. Yet the supermajority, like the Trump administration, treated their freedoms as entirely conditional. There is no obvious reason why the court should adopt such an absurdly cramped reading of federal law other than a skepticism that lawful permanent residents really <\/em>deserve to live in this country. In Jackson\u2019s words, \u201cCongress could not have meant for the guarantees it was affording to be so cavalierly swept aside.\u201d For this court, it seems, a green card is not proof that someone belongs here, but a mere privilege the government may withdraw at will.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Latest Court Loss Is a Doozy<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court blessed a Kafkaesque nightmare by a 6\u20133 vote along the usual partisan lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[28,64,18,11,72,73,15],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-clarence-thomas","tag-immigration","tag-judiciary","tag-jurisprudence","tag-ketanji-brown-jackson","tag-opinionpalooza-2026","tag-supreme-court"],"yoast_head":"\nClarence Thomas Just Gave Border Agents a Terrifying New Power - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=256\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Clarence Thomas Just Gave Border Agents a Terrifying New Power - 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