President Donald Trump’s visa scheme, which allows people to obtain U.S. residency in exchange for a $1 million fee, is an epic fail.
The Trump Gold Card, which was initially announced in June with a $5 million price tag, was formally unveiled via executive order in September.
“I hereby announce the Gold Card, a visa program overseen by the Secretary of Commerce that will facilitate the entry of aliens who have demonstrated their ability and desire to advance the interests of the United States by voluntarily providing a significant financial gift to the Nation,” the order read.
Experts noted that because Congress had not approved the scheme, which would allow wealthy foreigners to bypass legally established paths to residency, applicants could face legal obstacles and risk losing the millions forked over in fees.
“At the very minimum, they’d have to sue the U.S. government to get it back,” Shev Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Axios in December.
Comments made by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Thursday essentially rendered the issue moot, however, with Lutnick revealing under oath that only one person has been given a visa under the scheme.
Testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee regarding the 2027 budget for the Department of Commerce, the secretary was asked by Rep. Grace Meng how many applications had been approved since the program began.
“The process was recently resolved with DHS who runs the program, and they do a $15,000–the most serious vetting and analysis of any potential applicant in the history of government–usually it’s $600, these pay $15,000 for an extraordinary vet,” Lutnick replied, referring to the non-refundable processing fee applicants must pay at the time of application in addition to the $1 million fee collected once they had been approved.
“So, they have approved recently one person, and there are hundreds in the queue that they are going through the process,” noting that it was a new program and “they wanted to make sure they did it perfectly.”
Lutnick’s testimony is a sharp contrast from comments he made on the All-In Podcast in March 2025, where he claimed to have already sold 1000 Trump Gold Cards for $5 million each before the program had even launched.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to calls made by the Daily Beast. The White House has also been contacted for comment.
At least one public figure has claimed to have been a beneficiary of the program. In January, rapper Nicki Minaj made a series of posts online following her appearance at a summit held by the president that implied she had received a Gold Card.
In one post, Minaj shared a photo of a hand holding a Trump Gold Card. In a follow-up post made four hours later, she seemingly confirmed that she had received the card “free of charge,” writing that she was “Finalizing that citizenship paperwork as we speak as per MY wonderful, gracious, charming President.
An anonymous White House official later revealed to the New York Times that the card was just a memento and not a visa document.
A Homeland Security official said that given that Minaj has already been a permanent legal resident of the U.S. for two decades, she was already eligible to apply for citizenship.
Despite that, the White House was quick to use Minaj’s post to promote the program. Reposting Minaj’s photo of the Trump Gold Card, the official White House account wrote on X, “oh she’s super BASED‚” a reference to the star’s 2010 hit, adding a link to the official Trump Card website beneath.
