Foreigners in the United States who want to apply for a green card generally will have to leave the country and apply in their home nation, the Trump administration’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Friday, describing the shift as a return to the “original intent of the law” and a move to close a “loophole.” The agency said the policy would apply to people who are in the U.S. temporarily and want to become lawful permanent residents, except in “extraordinary circumstances.”
In its announcement, USCIS said the immigration system for nonimmigrants is designed for people who enter for a short time and for a specific purpose to depart when their visit ends. The agency also said that “their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process,” and it said USCIS officers would make determinations about whether applicants meet the exception standard.
The change is a departure from long-running practice, USCIS and immigration observers said in different ways. For decades, foreign nationals with legal status in the U.S. have been able to apply for and complete the process for permanent residence without having to finish the application steps in their home countries first, including people married to U.S. citizens, those on work and student visas, and refugees and political asylum seekers.
The announcement did not include an effective date, USCIS did not spell out whether people would be required to remain outside the United States for the duration of the process, and it did not say how the policy would apply to people whose applications were already underway, according to the AP report. USCIS also said in an emailed statement that people who provide an “economic benefit” or a “national interest” could likely remain in the U.S., while others would have to go abroad to apply.
Immigration advocates said the policy could be difficult to implement fairly and could worsen family separation risks. World Relief, a humanitarian and refugee resettlement organization, said in a letter that if a family member is required to go back to their country of origin for immigrant visa processing while immigrant visas are not being processed there, the result would be “a Catch-22,” with “indefinite separation of families,” the group wrote.
The announcement also triggered rapid scrutiny among immigration attorneys and aid groups trying to determine which statuses the guidance would affect. Shev Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said USCIS was trying to change “decades of processing of adjustment of status,” and she said the guidance “all applies very broadly to anyone seeking a green card.” Dalal-Dheini said that could include people married to U.S. citizens, immigrants with humanitarian protection, and holders of work visas and student and religious visas, and she said wait times for visa appointments at some U.S. consulates abroad could be “up to more than a year.”
Doug Rand, a former senior advisor at USCIS during the Biden administration, said the administration’s aim is to reduce access to permanent residency. He said senior officials in the Trump administration have “said over and over that they want fewer people to get permanent residency because permanent residency is a path to citizenship and they want to block that path for as many people as possible,” and he said about 600,000 people already in the U.S. apply each year for a green card.
Legal service organizations said their clients were already asking what the change would mean for them. Jessie De Haven, senior staff attorney with the California Immigration Project, said it was “really hard to tell how this is going to be applied,” and she said she expected it could have a “chilling effect on people applying.”
The policy comes amid broader steps the administration has taken to restrict entry and processing for people from various countries, including travel bans in some cases and pauses in visa processing in others. Experts and attorneys warned that forcing people to return home to apply for a green card could leave them unable to come back to the United States, depending on conditions at the time of application.