The Trump administration announced a sweeping change to US immigration policy on Friday that reverses a practice established for over fifty years, requiring most foreign nationals already living legally in the United States to leave the country and apply for permanent residency from their home nations rather than completing the process on American soil.
The policy, announced in a memo dated May 21 by US Citizenship and Immigration Services and confirmed publicly on Friday, eliminates what the agency calls the adjustment of status process for most applicants, replacing it with a requirement to attend an immigrant visa interview at a US consulate abroad.
USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler described the change as a return to the system’s original intent, arguing that temporary visa holders such as students, workers, and tourists were not designed to treat their US stay as the first step in a green card application.
The announcement drew immediate concern from immigration attorneys, aid organisations, and immigrant families who warned the change would create hardship for hundreds of thousands of people who had been in the midst of green card applications under the previous rules.
World Relief, a humanitarian and refugee resettlement organisation, warned that the change would in many cases result in indefinite family separations, as applicants from countries subject to travel bans or suspended visa processing would be forced to return home but unable to complete processing there or return to the United States while it was pending.
Doug Rand, a former senior USCIS official under the Biden administration, said the policy’s explicit goal is to reduce the total number of people who obtain permanent residency, describing it as part of a broader administration strategy to block the path from legal immigration to citizenship for as many people as possible.
The agency acknowledged that exceptions would be made in extraordinary circumstances, and a subsequent statement from Kahler indicated that applicants who would provide an economic benefit or serve the national interest could be permitted to complete their processing without leaving the country, though no formal criteria for those exceptions were defined.
USCIS declined to specify when the change would come into effect, whether applicants would need to remain outside the United States throughout the entire application process, or how the policy would interact with existing pending applications that were filed under the previous rules.
Approximately 500,000 people apply for green cards through the adjustment of status process each year, according to former USCIS officials, meaning the policy change could affect an enormous number of cases currently in the pipeline if applied retroactively or immediately to pending applications.
Immigration attorneys described a chaotic Friday afternoon of frantic client calls as they worked through the implications of a policy memo that was published without advance notice and left numerous fundamental questions about its implementation unanswered.
