The Trump administration announced late last week that most foreign nationals already in the United States who are seeking permanent residency will have to leave the country and apply for a green card from their home country, a policy shift that immigration attorneys and advocates described as sudden, confusing, and potentially disruptive for hundreds of thousands of people. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services made the announcement on Friday, May 22, with a brief notice that said the change would take effect immediately, without providing details on the scope of the exceptions or the timeline under which affected applicants must depart—omissions that deepened the uncertainty.
“It has a chilling effect because we have some cases that we were going to proceed and I can tell already, we should wait and see what’s going on,” said Flavia Santos Lloyd, an immigration attorney whose phone began ringing with anxious clients within hours of the agency’s notice. Lloyd said the lack of specifics has left practitioners unable to advise families about whether they face imminent departure or years of separation.
The policy applies to a broad category of applicants who are already living in the country on temporary visas, including many who have jobs, U.S.-citizen children, or pending family- or employment-based green card petitions. Until the announcement, those applicants could file for adjustment of status without leaving the U.S. Under the new rule, they will be required to leave—a process known as consular processing—and wait abroad while their applications are adjudicated, a timeline that can stretch for months or years.
Kevin Miner, an attorney with Pond Lehocky Immigration who favors more restrictive immigration policies, acknowledged that the change would bring U.S. practice closer to the consular-processing norm of other countries but said it would nonetheless be “more burdensome” for applicants. “It makes it harder for people who are already here, and that’s the point,” he said. “But it does align us with what most other nations require.”
Immigration hardliners have long argued that the adjustment-of-status pathway invites fraud and encourages overstays, but opponents of the new rule said it penalizes applicants who have been following the law. Matthew Soerens, the national coordinator for evangelical immigration advocacy at World Relief, said the administration is “making it impossible for families who are playing by the rules to stay together.” He predicted that the requirement would separate spouses and parents from their children for years.
Charles Kuck, a veteran immigration attorney based in Atlanta, called the policy “devastating” and “just cruel.” He said the lack of detail from USCIS means that many applicants now face a legal limbo in which they cannot be confident that leaving the country will not trigger a bar to return or expose them to risks in their home countries.
The green card announcement is the latest in a series of executive actions that have widened the administration’s immigration crackdown to include legal immigration channels. After spending much of 2025 and early 2026 focused on deterring and deporting migrants who entered the U.S. without authorization, the Trump administration has in recent months moved to restrict access to student visas, family-based visas, and now the green card process itself. The cumulative effect, immigration lawyers said, is a signal that the legal immigration system is being deliberately constricted.
The AP reported that the green card change could affect an estimated several hundred thousand applicants per year, a figure based on historical USCIS data for adjustment-of-status filings. Agency officials did not respond to requests from the wire service for clarification on the exceptions that would allow some applicants to remain. As of Wednesday, no detailed guidance had been published on the USCIS website beyond the initial announcement.