Yes. A lawful permanent resident coming home from a trip abroad can be pulled out of the line at a port of entry over an arrest that never produced a conviction, if the offense is one the immigration statute lists. On June 23, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Blanche v. Lau that a border officer does not need clear and convincing evidence of a crime before treating a green card holder as a person applying for admission to the United States. That reclassification moves the burden of proof onto the resident.
What Did the Supreme Court Decide?
The Court answered one question, and it answered it against permanent residents. From the syllabus: "The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) does not require a border officer to have clear and convincing evidence that a lawful permanent resident has committed a crime involving moral turpitude before deeming the resident an applicant for admission."
Blanche v. Lau, No. 25-429, was argued on April 22, 2026 and decided on June 23, 2026. Justice Thomas wrote for the majority, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. The vote was 6 to 3. The Court vacated the Second Circuit's decision, reported at 130 F.4th 42, and sent the case back for further proceedings. The slip opinion is posted at supremecourt.gov.
Muk Choi Lau was a lawful permanent resident with a pending criminal charge in New Jersey, not a conviction. When he arrived at a port of entry, officers did not admit him. They paroled him into the country, which is a different legal status carrying different consequences, and the rest of the case followed from that.
The phrase the case turned on, clear and convincing evidence, is a middle standard of proof. It asks for more than a suspicion or a hunch and less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The question was whether an officer standing at a counter, looking at a database entry, had to clear that bar before reclassifying a returning resident. The majority said the statute imposes no such requirement at that stage.
What Does "Applicant for Admission" Actually Mean?
It means the law stops treating you as someone who already lives here and starts treating you as someone standing outside the door asking to come in. Normally a returning permanent resident is not considered to be seeking admission at all. The statute, 8 U.S.C. section 1101(a)(13)(C), lists narrow exceptions to that rule. The fifth one, subsection (C)(v), covers a resident who has committed an offense identified in 8 U.S.C. section 1182(a)(2), the provision that includes crimes involving moral turpitude.
The Court read that statute in two steps, and the gap between the steps is the whole case. From the syllabus: "at step one, only commission of the crime is required to show that the alien could be regarded as seeking to be admitted; at step two, conviction or admission is required to show that the alien seeking to be admitted is inadmissible."
Commission alone is enough to open the door at the border. A conviction can arrive afterward. The Court cited Barton v. Barr, 590 U.S. 222, 232, for the point that the government may regard a permanent resident this way even when the conviction comes later.
Permanent residents had leaned on a footnote in Vartelas v. Holder, 566 U.S. 257, 275 n.11, for the idea that a conviction had to come first. The Court rejected that reading. It held that section 1101(a)(13)(C)(v) incorporates the list of crimes in section 1182(a)(2), "not its requirement of conviction."
Does This Change Anything Where I Live?
For most of the country, no. Before this decision, the Second Circuit, which covers New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, required an officer to have clear and convincing evidence at the moment of reentry before a returning resident could be treated as an applicant for admission. Absent that evidence, the resident stayed in the already-admitted category with its protections intact. The Fifth and Ninth Circuits had gone the other direction. The Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, sat in between and required probable cause, less than the Second Circuit but still something. The Second Circuit demanded the most, and the Supreme Court has now removed that. Which circuit's law applies turns on where your immigration case would be heard, not on which airport you land at. If your case would be heard in New York, Connecticut, or Vermont, a protection you had is gone. In the Third Circuit, the decision unsettles a lower standard the Supreme Court neither endorsed nor rejected. In the Fifth and Ninth Circuits it confirms the practice officers were already following.
What Did the Court Leave Standing?
One protection survives. The government still has to show, at the removal hearing itself, that the person was properly treated as an applicant for admission, under a Board of Immigration Appeals rule requiring clear and convincing evidence. The Court applied that rule instead of discarding it, and it said in a footnote that it was not deciding whether the government owes any burden at the border at all. What the decision changed is the timing. The government may now satisfy that showing with evidence gathered after the person is paroled, including a conviction that arrives later.
Who Has to Prove What?
The category you land in decides who carries the burden of proof, and the two categories point in opposite directions. This is the part worth understanding even if you skip everything else on this page.
Treated as already admitted: the matter proceeds as a deportation case, and under 8 C.F.R. section 1240.8(a) the government has to prove that you are deportable.
Treated as seeking admission: the matter proceeds as an inadmissibility case, and under 8 U.S.C. section 1229a(c)(2)(A) you have to prove that you are not inadmissible.
Justice Jackson's dissent built on that reversal. Someone who has lived in the United States for decades, who owns a home and raised children here, can step off an international flight and find that the presumption has flipped. The government no longer has to assemble a case against that person. That person has to defeat a charge, and has to do it while gathering old court records with an unsettled immigration status.
Burdens of proof sound abstract until a file is missing. If an arrest happened twenty years ago in a county that has since digitized its records badly, or a case was dismissed and the paper file was destroyed on schedule, the person who has to produce that history is the one who suffers from the gap. Under the deportation posture, a missing record is the government's problem. Under the inadmissibility posture, it is yours.
What Happens If I Am Paroled Into the Country?
You go home that night, and that is the part people misread as good news. Parole is not admission. It is permission to be physically present in the United States while the government decides what to do next. Lau was paroled and walked out of the airport. His legal position was worse than it had been that morning, and nothing about walking out told him so.
A permanent resident paroled at the border is typically issued a Form I-94 carrying an I-551 stamp. Officers may keep the physical permanent resident card. The stamp becomes the only proof of status that person is holding.
Nothing else visibly changes right away. You drive home. You go back to work Monday. The immigration case, if one comes, begins later with a charging document called a notice to appear, which is what puts the matter in front of an immigration judge. Until that document issues, there is no hearing to attend, no evidence to file, and no ruling to challenge. The change in your legal position has already happened; the proceeding that reflects it has not started.
Can I Lose My Job Because of the Stamp?
Yes, and this is the piece almost nobody sees coming. Justice Jackson raised it in dissent. USCIS instructs employers to treat an I-551 stamp on an I-94 as a short-term receipt for employment eligibility verification, valid only "1 year after the issuance date if the stamp does not contain an expiration date." When that year runs out, the employer must reverify. The obvious document to produce is the permanent resident card, which is the card the officers kept at the port of entry, though an employee may instead present other unexpired documents the I-9 rules accept.
So a permanent resident whom no court has convicted of anything could lose the ability to take a job within twelve months of being paroled, while still physically inside the United States. The clock attaches to the stamp, not to the person. An employer who already verified an unexpired green card years ago is not supposed to re-check it, but anyone starting a new job, being rehired, or already verified on the stamp will be asked for work documents again when the year runs out. Nothing replaces the stamp automatically before it lapses. Anyone in this position should note the issuance date the day it is stamped, count forward a year, and start asking in writing well before that date arrives.
How Long Can This Drag On?
There is no deadline. Justice Jackson put it plainly in footnote 6 of her dissent: "Paroled LPRs can be kept in legal limbo for as long as the Government chooses." Nothing in the statute requires the government to file charging documents within any particular window after paroling someone at the border.
In Lau's own case, the government waited about two years after the parole before issuing a notice to appear. That is roughly two years of holding a stamp instead of a card, with no immigration court date to prepare for and no decision to appeal. The one-year employment authorization clock does not pause while that wait plays out.
Did the Court Rule That Trademark Counterfeiting Is a Crime Involving Moral Turpitude?
No, and be careful with summaries that suggest otherwise. Lau's trademark-counterfeiting conviction came after his parole, and whether that offense qualifies as a crime involving moral turpitude was not resolved. The Supreme Court vacated the Second Circuit's judgment and remanded that exact question. It is still open. Anyone telling you the Supreme Court settled the moral turpitude status of trademark counterfeiting is misreading the opinion.
Does Becoming a Citizen Fix This?
It removes this particular exposure, because everything in the holding depends on being a lawful permanent resident standing at a port of entry. United States citizens cannot be treated as applicants for admission. A citizen returning from abroad is coming home in the full legal sense, and an old arrest does not convert that arrival into an immigration proceeding.
The number of people this could matter to is large. The DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics estimated that as of January 1, 2025, roughly 8.5 million of the approximately 13.05 million lawful permanent residents in the country were eligible to naturalize. Millions of people are carrying an exposure that a completed application would close off.
Naturalization is not automatic and it is not free of risk. The process carries its own good moral character requirement, and a criminal record can affect that finding, sometimes seriously. Applying also puts your history in front of the government. For anyone with an arrest record, whether and when to file is a question worth working through with an accredited representative or a nonprofit immigration legal services provider before submitting anything. General information about the process is published at uscis.gov.
What Should I Do Before I Travel Internationally?
Start by getting your own records, because the officer at the counter may be working from a database entry you have never seen. A few concrete steps:
Request certified dispositions for every arrest in your history, including charges that were dismissed, diverted, or expunged, from the clerk of court in each county involved.
Check whether any charge is still open anywhere. A pending charge is what put Lau in this position.
Request your own immigration file through a Freedom of Information Act request to USCIS so you know what the government's records say about you.
Carry copies of those dispositions when you travel instead of leaving the only set at home.
Write down a phone number for someone who can reach a legal representative on your behalf, and leave a copy with a family member.
Before booking, talk with an accredited representative or a nonprofit immigration legal services organization about whether the trip is worth taking at all.
Some travelers with old records decide not to leave the country. That is a legitimate choice and, for some people, the cautious one. It is also a real cost, in missed funerals and weddings and sick parents, and no one should pretend otherwise.
What none of this can tell you is how your own case would come out. Nobody can answer that from the outside, and it is worth being skeptical of anyone who tries. Immigration outcomes turn on the particular offense, the date, the statute of conviction, the port of entry, the officer, and the immigration judge. What Blanche v. Lau settled is the threshold question of who can be pushed into the applicant-for-admission category and who then has to carry the burden of proof. Everything downstream of that stays individual to the person and the file. This article is general legal information, not legal advice.
Frequently asked questions
Can a green card holder be denied entry for an arrest with no conviction?
A returning lawful permanent resident can be treated as an applicant for admission based on commission of a covered offense, and under Blanche v. Lau (June 23, 2026) the officer does not need clear and convincing evidence to do so. That does not itself decide inadmissibility, which still requires a conviction or an admission of the offense, but it changes the posture of the case at the border.
What is the difference between being paroled and being admitted at a port of entry?
Admission means you enter with your status intact and any later immigration case proceeds as a deportation matter, where the government carries the burden. Parole means you are allowed to be physically present while the government decides what to do, and any later case proceeds as an inadmissibility matter, where you carry the burden. Parole usually comes with an I-94 bearing an I-551 stamp.
How long is an I-551 stamp valid for employment verification?
USCIS instructs employers to accept an I-551 stamp on an I-94 as a temporary receipt for employment eligibility verification, valid for one year after the issuance date if the stamp carries no expiration date. When that year ends, the employer must reverify and will ask for the permanent resident card, which a paroled resident may no longer have in hand.
Does Blanche v. Lau apply in every state?
The holding applies nationwide. Its practical effect is largest in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, where the Second Circuit had required clear and convincing evidence before a returning resident could be treated as an applicant for admission. The Fifth and Ninth Circuits already allowed the practice, so there it confirms what officers were doing. The Third Circuit, covering New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, had required probable cause, a standard this decision leaves unsettled.
Is trademark counterfeiting a crime involving moral turpitude?
That question is unresolved. The Supreme Court in Blanche v. Lau did not decide whether the trademark-counterfeiting conviction at issue qualified as a crime involving moral turpitude. It vacated the Second Circuit's judgment and sent that question back on remand. Summaries stating that the Court settled the point are misreading the opinion.
This article is general legal information, not legal advice, and may not reflect the most current law or the law in your jurisdiction. Laws vary by state and change over time. For advice about your specific situation, consult a licensed attorney.
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