The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether immigration authorities may deport a Chinese citizen with a U.S. green card who was convicted of counterfeiting in New Jersey.

The legal issue is whether the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) correctly classified the man, who is a lawful permanent resident of the United States, when he returned to the country after a trip to his native China. He was eventually convicted on state counterfeiting charges, but at the time he reentered the country, the charges were still pending against him.

The nation’s highest court granted the federal government’s petition in Bondi v. Lau in an unsigned order on Jan. 9. No justices dissented. The court did not explain its decision.

The petition itself is not available on the Supreme Court’s online docket because the court ordered that special privacy rules be applied to the case. Such measures are taken to protect sensitive information. A Jan. 9 docket entry mentions the order but does not explain why it was issued.

According to a March 4, 2025, ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Muk Choi Lau, a Chinese citizen, became a lawful permanent resident of the United States on Sept. 7, 2007. The government-issued residency document issued to such people is colloquially called a green card.

On May 7, 2012, he was charged with violating New Jersey law by engaging in third-degree trademark counterfeiting. Before his trial, he temporarily left the country. When he returned on June 15, 2012, he presented himself as a lawful permanent resident, but immigration authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport declined to formally admit him to the country. Instead, they granted him parole with deferred inspection, meaning he was allowed into the country subject to a later decision on his immigration status, the written opinion said.

According to the ruling, on June 24, 2013, Lau entered a guilty plea and was convicted of trademark counterfeiting and sentenced to two years of probation. On March 13, 2014, DHS began deportation proceedings against him, arguing that he was ineligible to be admitted to the United States because he was convicted of “a crime involving moral turpitude.” An offense involving moral turpitude is a serious crime, such as counterfeiting, fraud, forgery, rape, kidnapping, embezzlement, robbery, or drug trafficking.

Lau argued that the immigration authorities erred when they treated him as a foreigner seeking admission instead of admitting him based on his lawful permanent resident status. He also argued that the crime he was convicted of fell under the “petty offense” exception in Section 1182 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the opinion said.

On April 20, 2016, he applied for a ruling that would allow the U.S. attorney general to waive his inadmissibility. The act states that to be eligible, an alien has to have “lawfully resided continuously in the United States for a period of not less than [seven] years immediately preceding the date of initiation of proceedings to remove the alien.”

He admitted he had been a lawful permanent resident for about six years and seven months when his deportation proceeding was initiated, but he argued that the time he spent in the country before the resident status was granted should be deemed to be part of the seven-year period, the opinion said.

On March 20, 2018, an immigration judge found that his conviction counted as a crime of moral turpitude and did not fall under the petty offense exception because the maximum sentence for counterfeiting exceeded one year of incarceration. The judge held that even though Lau had not been convicted when he sought reentry to the country, he was appropriately classified as inadmissible because he had already committed the crime by the time he sought reentry. The judge also found that he was not eligible for the waiver of inadmissibility because he had not resided continuously in the country for seven years before the removal proceeding was initiated, according to the opinion.

On Nov. 23, 2021, the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed Lau’s appeal and upheld the judge’s order.

The Second Circuit took up Lau’s appeal and ruled in his favor.

The appeals court found that the existence of a pending criminal charge does not provide the “clear and convincing evidence” of a crime of moral turpitude needed for DHS to deem him, a lawful permanent resident, to be a readmission applicant who could be paroled into the country. Because of that finding, the court said it was not necessary to rule on whether his crime counted as a crime of moral turpitude or whether the immigration authorities were wrong to deny his request for a waiver. The court vacated the final order of removal against Lau without prejudice, meaning the government may try again to deport him in the future.

According to a summary of the case on the Supreme Court’s website, the justices will consider whether the federal government “must prove that it possessed clear and convincing evidence of the [counterfeiting] offense at the time of the [lawful permanent resident’s] last reentry into the United States.”

A date for oral argument has not yet been scheduled.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Jan. 14, 2026, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Jan. 15, 2026.