Trump administration begins making new requests of green-card applicants

Immigration officers have begun making new requests of green-card applicants that lawyers believe will stress an already overwhelmed processing system and deter some people from seeking legal status.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Friday that most applicants will need to return to their countries of origin to apply for permanent residency, upending a decades-old legal practice that allowed immigrants to apply for a green card from within the United States.

USCIS has already started asking some applicants why they did not leave the United States and return home to apply for a green card, according to two lawyers with direct knowledge of the communications. Some are also being asked why they didn’t return home when their visas expired, or if there is anything preventing them from applying through a consulate.

“We’re already seeing it filter down to the field office,” said Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He said his organization has fielded inquiries from several lawyers reporting the new questions. “This is another method of putting cogs in the wheel to try and shut down legal immigration.”

The new policy guidance that most immigrants should apply outside the United States has sparked fears that family members could be separated for years, while some tech leaders, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have condemned it as harmful to business. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s administration has offered few detail about who would be affected, although a USCIS spokesman said late Friday that applicants who demonstrate an “economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest” would still be allowed to apply for green cards from inside the country.

USCIS did not respond to requests for further information on the new questions green-card applicants are being asked. Lawyers with knowledge of the new inquiries said it was unclear how widely the questions were being posed and whether they applied only to certain applicants.

Joseph said that even before Friday’s announcement, some immigrants applying for green cards were being subjected to an unusual level of scrutiny early on in the process. He said there have been requests for applicants to submit additional evidence showing why they should be granted residency, such as proof of family ties to a U.S. citizen, level of education and English fluency, tax records, service in the armed forces and history of employment, among other requests.

Such records have not been requested in the past, he said, except in cases where a person had a major red flag in their application, such as a criminal conviction, and needed to provide further information.

Lacking guidance from the Trump administration, many attorneys have advised their clients not to leave the United States until USCIS releases further information.

“People are generally freaking out,” said Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney in Atlanta. “I have had multiple calls since Friday with people asking about when they have to leave the U.S.”

A Department of Homeland Security official told The Washington Post in a statement that the new guidelines restate “longstanding law and policy — which was disregarded by the Biden Administration.”

The official stressed that the policy will “have no noticeable impact on highly qualified applicants and skilled professionals who have followed the law,” adding that Trump is prioritizing “immigration that strengthens America culturally, socially, and financially while preventing mass third world migration which hurts our country.”

Immigration lawyers said the policy could affect workers, students, executives and clergy, but probably poses the biggest risk to spouses and family members applying for permanent residence. For example, an immigrant who entered on a tourist visa and applied for a green card after marrying a U.S. citizen might come under greater scrutiny than in the past. Such applicants generally have been allowed to “adjust” their statuses, even though they may have violated the terms of their tourist visa, if they stayed beyond the permitted dates. Tourist visas are also different from certain work visas that offer a path toward legal residency because they permit recipients to come only for non-immigration-related travel.

Green-card applicants who overstayed their tourist visas could even be barred from reentering the United States for up to 10 years. Asylum-seekers and refugees, who in most cases apply for green cards under a different federal statute than the one cited by the Trump administration, would not necessarily be affected, the lawyers said.

Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the organization is reviewing the policy change and is “concerned that it will make it more difficult for individuals, including recent graduates, researchers and those already working legally in the United States to pursue legal permanent residency.”

“This has the potential to be incredibly disruptive for employers and our legal immigration system,” Bradley added.

Amazon, Meta and Apple, which are among the top sponsors of employment-based green cards, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Post. Microsoft declined to comment. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

“Harmful move for tech, business, and America broadly,” LinkedIn’s Hoffman posted on social media in response to the news. The company is another major sponsor of green cards.

Some immigration attorneys said the wording of Friday’s memo from USCIS Director Joseph Edlow was not as draconian as administration officials suggested in their public statements. Edlow’s spokesman had said that temporary visa holders in the United States would be permitted to seek green cards while in the United States only in “extraordinary circumstances” — but that phrase was not included in the director’s memo.

“This is like a lot of policy announcements the administration has done over the past year and a half, where they come out with some big, scary announcement to freak everybody out — and then, once we see the way this plays out, my hope is that it is not as broad or nefarious or harmful,” said Rachel Zoghlin Bautista, who directs pro bono work and partnerships at humanitarian group HIAS.

Foreigners in the United States on temporary visas for highly skilled workers, known as H-1B’s, make up a significant portion of those who apply for green cards. Business leaders have warned that the new guidance could force foreign employees to leave the country for long periods, disrupting their ability to continue their work.

Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS staffer who now focuses on immigration and social policy at Third Way, a centrist think tank, said the outcry was another example of the Trump administration’s “tension with the business community.”

“This administration wants to restrict legal immigration, but legal immigration is a very important part of the economy and job market, and they keep running into that wall,” she said.

Some green-card applicants who leave the United States may be unable to return quickly, especially if they are from one of the 75 countries where the Trump administration has frozen visa processing, or from a place with yearslong consular wait times or no U.S. Embassy.

Aziz Awadelkarim, a cardiologist at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Michigan, said the news has put him and his pregnant wife, a pediatric cardiologist, who have pending green-card applications, in an impossible situation.

The couple are from war-stricken Sudan, one of the countries with an active travel ban and no functioning U.S. Embassy — meaning if they left the country, it would be impossible to return.

“This recent decision increases our uncertainty more,” Awadelkarim said. “If you are from one of the banned countries, or if your country has humanitarian crisis and it’s dangerous to go back then basically, you don’t have a pathway for permanent residency.”