The Trump administration is banning most foreigners from applying for green cards while in the United States.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has claimed the change in policy is merely a realignment with the original intent of immigration law. But it also aligns with the Trump administration’s broader efforts to limit legal immigration.
“Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose,” USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said in a statement. “Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process.”
That process, up until now, has been “incentivizing loopholes,” Kahler added.
In a policy memo, USCIS states that foreigners should use U.S. consulates to apply for green cards, with limited exceptions. Those could include people with “dual intent” or immigrant visas, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow explained.
But, Edlow wrote, “as a general matter the discretionary approval of such a request is extraordinary given Congress’s intent that aliens should depart once the purpose for which they sought parole or nonimmigrant admission from [the Department of Homeland Security] has been accomplished.”
Of the more than 1 million green cards authorized annually, more than half of the applicants were already living in the U.S., federal data shows, The Washington Post reported.
For decades, it has been common for some visa holders in the U.S. to apply to change their statuses.
“It’s like someone from 1940s America has taken over the immigration system,” David Bier, the Cato Institute’s director of immigration studies, told the Post. Altering one’s status “has been a normal part of operations in immigration law for over 70 years. There’s nothing extraordinary about it.”
The USCIS announcement is the latest restrictive immigration action by the Trump administration, whose rollout of visa Gold Cards has flopped.
Last year, it moved to shorten visa durations for journalists, students and people on cultural exchange programs. The administration claimed doing so was necessary to better “monitor and oversee” visa holders while in the country.
That April, foreign students with pro-Palestine views who were attending Southern universities had their visas revoked.
In October, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did the same to those whom he claimed made light of Charlie Kirk’s killing.
Two months later, the administration shut down a program known as the “Green Card Lottery.”
In January, Rubio announced that more than 100,000 visas had been revoked since Trump’s inauguration.
When reached for comment, the White House referred the Daily Beast to the USCIS press release.
