The Trump administration on Friday unveiled a sweeping new immigration policy that would require hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants already living and working in the United States to leave the country in order to apply for permanent residency.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced the shift via policy memo PM-602-0199, framing the change as a correction to decades of practice.
“We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly,” USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler said in a statement. “From now on, an alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances.”
The agency further argued that the current system rewards loophole-seeking behavior.
“This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” Kahler added. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”
USCIS also justified the policy on resource grounds, stating: “Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process. Following the law allows the majority of these cases to be handled by the State Department at U.S. consular offices abroad and frees up limited USCIS resources.”
What “Adjustment of Status” Actually Is — And Who Uses It
The policy targets what is known as “adjustment of status” — the process by which immigrants already legally present in the United States can apply for a green card without leaving the country. Students, temporary workers, tourists, and spouses of U.S. citizens have long used this pathway.
The scale of the change is hard to overstate. According to former USCIS official Doug Rand, in a typical year, roughly 1 million people apply for green cards — and half of those apply from within the U.S. by changing their status while living here. David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that adjustment of status has been used “for over half of all legal immigrants in the last generation.
There are already an estimated 1 million pending adjustment of status claims currently in the pipeline — applications that could now be jeopardized or denied under the new guidance.
Why Critics Say This Is Deeply Problematic
The new policy has drawn immediate and fierce condemnation from immigration lawyers, former officials, and policy experts across the political spectrum — including libertarians who typically support deregulation.
“The purpose of this policy is exclusion,” said former USCIS official Doug Rand. Immigration attorney Golinger warned the move would cause severe hardship on multiple fronts: families of U.S. citizens forced to separate for indefinite periods, employers who followed extensive legal processes to sponsor workers for permanent residency, and the agency itself. “Golinger said the fees, usually around $2,500 per application, keep USCIS afloat, as it does not receive funding from Congress,” Newsweek reported. “She also said that U.S. consulates and embassies will be negatively impacted when they already have significant backlogs of cases.”
Bier was even more blunt: “These are all people who qualify to stay here permanently and Congress clearly wanted them to have a way to stay. He’s telling them to leave America. This admin continues to prove itself to be the most anti-legal immigration admin in US history. The harms this will cause to legal immigrants is incalculable. Impossible to explain how stupid and evil this policy is. It’s intended to cost people their jobs and their families.”
The policy compounds an already dire situation. The State Department has simultaneously halted immigrant visa processing in 75 countries. And USCIS itself ordered a pause on all pending immigration applications around Thanksgiving last year — a policy still being litigated in federal court.
Legal Challenges On The Horizon
Legal experts suggest the policy is highly vulnerable to court challenge. Among the strongest arguments against it: a change of this magnitude — affecting hundreds of thousands of people and upending decades of established practice — typically must go through a formal “notice-and-comment” rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedure Act. The administration bypassed that process entirely.
The new USCIS memo does not change the underlying statutory framework, but significantly narrows how officers apply their discretion, according to legal analysis from the International Legal and Business Services Group. That distinction may matter in court.
