Supreme Court loosens restrictions on deporting criminals

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday said the U.S. government could meet a lower burden of proof when removing some lawful permanent residents from the country. In the 6-3 ruling, the justices held that when a lawful permanent resident has committed a crime, the government need only meet the most basic standard of evidence to show that the individual should be removed.

What is this lower burden of proof? When trying to deport a foreigner from the United States, the government has to decide whether that individual is “inadmissible” or “deportable.” Someone is inadmissible if they were never formally allowed to enter the country to begin with, and someone is deportable if they were formally allowed into the country but then engaged in a criminal action that required the government to remove them.

The government has to meet more stringent requirements to remove someone who has been admitted than it does to remove someone who was never admitted, the court’s majority opinion explained. Usually, lawful permanent residents are considered people admitted into the United States. As such, the government has to meet a higher burden of proof to remove them from the country. But in some cases, the government can treat a lawful permanent resident as inadmissible if they’ve committed a certain kind of crime.

What about this case? That was the situation in Blanche v. Muk Choi Lau, the case before the Supreme Court. In 2012, during the Obama administration, immigration officers put lawful permanent resident Muk Choi Lau on immigration parole after he returned from a short trip to China. The given reason was that he had been charged with a counterfeiting crime. Lau sued, arguing that the immigration officers overstepped their authority. In Tuesday’s ruling, the Supreme Court decided this was one such case where the government appropriately considered a lawful permanent resident as inadmissible.

Did the court hand down any other significant rulings on Tuesday? The U.S. Supreme Court found that a Rastafarian man who received a haircut—despite having a court order protecting his religious convictions against having his hair cut—could not sue individual workers at a prison unless those workers formally acknowledged that they could be sued in their official capacities.

Dig deeper: Read my report in The Sift about how a lower court judge found a Trump administration voter screening database to be illegal.