As an immigrant, Maria Reimers tried to do everything by the book. She entered the U.S. legally, married an American citizen and secured a green card to work. Together, she and her husband managed to open a small storefront in Ephrata, a dot of a town in Washington state.
But when Reimers tried to become a U.S. citizen in 2017, she was denied for lack of “good moral character.” Federal immigration officials deemed her work “illicit drug trafficking,” because the couple’s business in Ephrata sells state-regulated cannabis. Though it is legal in Washington state, their retail shop has put Reimers’ dream of citizenship in jeopardy. She gets to keep her green card, but her attorney recommended that she not visit her family in El Salvador, because of the possibility that she’d be detained at the border when she returned.
“We didn’t think about the consequences of getting involved, or how the federal law was going to affect us,” Maria Reimers said. “I’ve been in this country 20 years. I am contributing to the country, but I don’t have the moral character to become a citizen? Do you think it is fair?”
Immigrants across the country in states where cannabis has been legalized share Reimers’ frustration. The federal government still considers cannabis illegal, but since states began to legalize sales in 2014, it has largely looked the other way when U.S. citizens get involved in the burgeoning industry. Immigrants, however, still face a litany of consequences — including denial of citizenship, lifetime bans from lawful permanent residency and even deportation.
It’s difficult to estimate the number of legal immigrants who could be impacted by the policy. The federal government doesn’t track employment in the cannabis industry, and the companies that do don’t collect any data on how many immigrants are participating in the workforce. Foreign-born workers make up about 18 percent of the U.S. workforce, according to a 2022 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While noncitizen workers are only a subset of that group, the number of immigrants like Reimers who could be vulnerable to immigration consequences for their work is likely in the thousands.
Meanwhile, advocates and U.S. senators in states where cannabis is legal have asked for help from President Joe Biden, who at times has shown a more tolerant attitude toward cannabis. In an executive order in October 2022, Biden offered pardons to citizens with federal convictions for simple possession of cannabis, and directed agencies to review how cannabis should be classified. In August, the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that it be moved from Schedule I, classified as a highly addictive drug with no medical usefulness, to Schedule III, a category with less potential for misuse. Now it’s up to the Drug Enforcement Administration to make the final call, and there’s no announced timeline for when that will happen.
But under the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not changed how immigration proceedings judge cannabis work, leaving vulnerable workers like Reimers unable to naturalize or secure green cards and afraid that they could be expelled from the country over their livelihoods.
