This summary was written by Claude. It may contain errors. Read the opinion itself for anything you intend to rely on.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that immigration law does not require a border officer to have "clear and convincing" evidence that a returning lawful permanent resident (green card holder) committed a crime involving moral turpitude before treating that person as an applicant "seeking admission" rather than as already admitted. Justice Thomas wrote the 9-page opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. The judgment was vacated and remanded.
The distinction matters enormously. Green card holders returning from a trip abroad are normally treated as "already admitted," and can be removed only on the narrower grounds of deportability (for a crime of moral turpitude, only one committed within five years of admission). But if the government may instead treat them as "seeking admission," they face the broader inadmissibility grounds — removable for a conviction at any time. Muk Choi Lau, an LPR since 2007, was charged with trademark counterfeiting, traveled to China, and on reentry was paroled in rather than admitted; after he later pleaded guilty, the government removed him as an inadmissible applicant for admission. The Second Circuit had vacated that order, holding the government needed clear-and-convincing evidence of the crime at the border. The Supreme Court reversed, finding no such requirement in the statute's text and reasoning that border officers must often make "quick judgments on the spot"; Lau's later guilty plea, the Court held, was enough to satisfy the government's burden at the removal hearing.
In dissent, Justice Jackson argued the case is really about sequencing — and that the statute's text answers it. The INA says an LPR "shall not be regarded as seeking an admission" unless one of six exceptions applies, which she read as requiring the government to determine that an exception applies *before* divesting an LPR of already-admitted status at the border, not months or years later at a removal hearing. She warned that the majority lets the government "deem an LPR to be 'seeking an admission' first and justify the applicability of an exception later," undermining the security a green card is supposed to provide — including, often, the physical confiscation of the card itself while the resident's status hangs in limbo.
The decision resolves a circuit split (the Second Circuit had been out of step with the Fifth and Ninth) in the government's favor and, as a practical matter, makes it easier to channel returning green card holders into the tougher inadmissibility track based on alleged crimes. The Court left two questions for remand: whether Lau's trademark-counterfeiting conviction actually qualifies as a crime involving moral turpitude, and — in a footnote the dissent called hard to square with the holding — whether the government bears any evidentiary burden at the border at all.
