Linus Chan, in The ordinary cases demise in criminal sentencing & its implications for immigration law, at Crimmigration.com, summarized the impact of Johnson v. United States as follows:

After the Supreme Court announced the ordinary case method in James, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), and a couple of federal circuit courts began to adopt it in immigration cases when deciding whether someone has committed a crime of violence under 18 U.S.C. 16(b). Section 16(b)s language is not an exact match to ACCAs residual clause, but isnt far off. Section 16(b) defines a crime of violence as a felony which, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense. Like the ACCAs residual clause, 16(b) requires an examination of risk, and also looks at whether force is used in the course of committing the offense. Two circuit courts called the phrases virtually identical. See Roberts v. Holder, 745 F.3d 928, 930 (8th Cir. 2014); Lopez-Cardona v. Holder, 662 F.3d 1110, 1113 (9th Cir. 2011). Moreover, the Ninth and Fifth Circuits applied the ordinary case from James to 16(b) cases. Rodriguez-Castellon v. Holder, 733 F.3d 847, 854 (9th Cir. 2013); Perez-Munoz v. Keisler, 507 F.3d 357, 363 (5th Cir. 2007). The BIA had begun applying the ordinary case method to 16(b) cases in 2011, see Matter of Ramon Martinez, 25 I&N Dec. 571 (BIA 2011), and just a few weeks before Johnson reiterated its support for the ordinary case method in Matter of Francisco-Alonzo, 26 I&N Dec 594 (BIA 2015) (analyzed on this blog here). In Francisco-Alonzo, the BIA relied heavily on the fact that James had not been overruled, and it saw no reason to question the rule when examining risk based definitions. The James ordinary method, it seemed, had become embedded in immigration law.

The reliance on James as good precedent proved to be ill timed. On June 26, 2015, just three weeks after Francisco-Alonzo the United States Supreme Court not only overruled James in Johnson but also found that the residual clause of the ACCA and the ordinary case method unconstitutionally vague under the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment. The Court specifically criticized the ordinary case rule. It ties the judicial assessment of the risk to a judicially imagined ordinary case of a crime, not to real-world facts for statutory elements, the Court concluded. Johnson, No. 13-7120, slip op at 5. The Court wrote that such an exercise was too speculative and too unreliable to give guidance to either defendants or judges. The Court explained that other risk-assessment statutes did their work by gauging the riskiness of conduct in which an individual defendant engages on a particular occasion. As a general matter, we do not doubt the constitutionality of laws that call for an application of a qualitative standard such as substantive risk to real-word conduct Id. at 12. Ultimately the residual clause was vague because it requires application of the serious potential risk standard to an idealized ordinary case of the crime. Because the elements necessary to determine the imaginary ideal are uncertain both in nature and degree of effect, the Court concluded, this abstract inquiry offers significantly less predictability than one [t]hat deals with the actual, not with an imaginary condition other than the facts. Id. (quoting International Harvester Co. of America v. Kentucky, 234 U. S. 216, 223 (1914)).