The Trump administration announced a new move Friday that will make it harder, if not impossible, for immigrants to the United States to become permanent legal residents. Instead of continuing the sensible and longstanding practice of letting immigrants who are already here on visas apply for their green cards, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that, moving forward, except in extraordinary circumstances, people seeking permanent residency must first return to their home countries and apply at U.S. consular offices there.
USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler tried to make the new policy sound reasonable and said new rules would “make our system fairer and more efficient.” But that’s not true. This isn’t about fairness or efficiency. The obvious goal is to discourage immigration altogether, and the implementation of this policy would lead to awful consequences.
The purpose of this policy is exclusion.
former uscis official doug rand
According to Department of Homeland Security data, the U.S. issued about 1.4 million green cards in 2024. More than 820,000 of them were issued to applicants already living in the U.S. through what’s called “adjustment of status.” Former USCIS official Doug Rand said in a statement, “The purpose of this policy is exclusion,” and then added: “Remember that Trump has banned people from over 100 countries from returning to the U.S., so forcing them to go abroad for consular processing is no pathway at all.”
The green card process as it exists now is already long, expensive and complicated. For example, my parents first applied for a green card in 1989. We didn’t arrive to the U.S. until 2002. That’s how long it took. And we had every resource available to us, including money.
That’s why Rand is right to say that this new proposal is about exclusion and eliminating a pathway.
Unreliable transportation to hard-to-reach embassies are among the challenges many applicants will face if they return to their home countries. The process, which many applicants tackle on their own while here in the U.S., will most likely have to be navigated with lawyers if they do so abroad.
Completing the application process from inside the U.S. provides access to support networks. Multiple organizations across the U.S. help applicants with the green card process for free. These organizations offer resources and know-how, in addition to emotional guidance for what is a daunting and costly multistep process. Such a level of support would be nearly impossible to find in many applicants’ home countries. This will undoubtedly force applicants and their loved ones to incur debt just to complete the green card application process.
Most alarming is the risk of family separation. This policy change, if carried out, will disrupt lives and destabilize families by uprooting the applicant from their home. Subjecting these individuals to family separation is cruel and unnecessary. For applicants with children, there is the financial burden of maintaining two households, which will further affect the livelihood of these families.
For applicants who have already secured jobs and built their careers in the U.S., this new policy would force them out of those positions and create an interruption that stalls their careers and makes their green card application less likely to be approved.
My parents applied for a green card in 1989. We didn’t arrive to the U.S. until 2002. That’s how long it took.
This measure doesn’t benefit the lawful immigration process. It devalues it by penalizing individuals who are in the country legally and already following the rules and procedures they have been asked to abide by. This change erodes the faith and trust necessary for an immigration system to function fairly by forcing immigrants who want to apply for permanent residency to rearrange their lives for an uncertain period of time and depriving them of the economic and political freedoms and opportunities they seek in this country.
The immigration process can take many years, but assimilation, including language acquisition and fluency, can take even longer. Forcing people to go back home would further complicate, if not, completely end that process of adjusting to a new country and culture. It would deny applicants the chance to assimilate faster.
But all of the above assumes the new rules are being offered in good faith and that applicants abroad will be given a fair chance. In reality, these changes are likely intended to derail applicants by forcing them out of the country and making it impossible for them to return.
My family’s journey took well over a decade. But we navigated the bureaucratic processes with hope, and most importantly, with the belief that we wouldn’t face additional hurdles. New applicants deserve a shot at a consistent, fair process that won’t change from one day to the next — a process that will allow them to use their time and resources to be the best version of themselves.
Many of the conversations regarding immigration focus on the legality or illegality of a person’s entry. But in this case, we’re talking about people who entered by the book. How the U.S. treats the people it knows have entered legally is an equally important aspect of the conversation. What the Trump administration is proposing clearly isn’t intended to soon welcome them as new Americans but to send them away and leave them be stuck in an overseas paperwork purgatory they may never escape.
Annell López is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for best debut short story collection.