Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
In yet another attempt to reduce the approval of green card applications to curb legal immigration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the Trump administration announced that certain applicants for permanent residence within the United States will be required to return to their home countries and file their applications through U.S. consulates abroad.
We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, including spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents. This also includes highly skilled professionals who are already working and conducting research in the United States, although the government has clarified that they may be exempt.
This change will cause more family separations and further slow application processing, increasing already lengthy wait times from months to potentially years.
Green cards obtained through an employer can take an average of 3.4 years, and family reunification wait times vary widely by visa category and country of origin.
For legal permanent resident (LPR) cards, the backlog stands at 1.2 million.
Who will be required to leave the country will be determined on a case-by-case basis, the agency explained, but remaining in the United States will be the exception rather than the rule. The change is expected to affect students, temporary workers, and other nonimmigrants currently in the United States.
And it has serious implications for those who overstayed their visas or entered without documents, as leaving the country triggers the three- and ten-year bars on returning to the United States provided for in immigration law. And if they remain in the United States, they may trigger unlawful presence bars, making them targets for detention and deportation, explained immigration attorney David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
“This has never been about fixing the immigration system. It’s about destroying all immigration and particularly attacking legal immigration,” Leopold stated.
According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “in fiscal year (FY) 2024, close to 1.4 million immigrants became lawful permanent residents (LPRs, also known as green-card holders).
Meanwhile, 58 percent (783,800) of new LPRs in FY 2024 received a green card from within the United States. Most of these new permanent residents were spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens and green-card holders (53 percent), followed by people who adjusted from refugee or asylee status (28 percent) or obtained a green card through employment (15 percent),” the MPI report states.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, took to social media to react to the change. “Why does it matter if people have to apply abroad? It could force people to leave their jobs, homes, and families for weeks or months, all at their own expense; consular decisions are virtually unchallengeable in court, even when egregiously wrong; backlogs can be much worse.”
From the outset of the Trump administration, the approach has not been solely against undocumented immigrants but also targeted legal immigration, particularly that of immigrants of color. Throughout Trump’s term, we have seen this with the cancellation of TPS for nationals of various countries, the end of humanitarian parole, the reduction in the number of asylum seekers and refugees, and delays in renewing DACA permits. The idea is to de-legalize them so they become deportable.
According to the MPI, some of the measures implemented during the Trump years that have reduced authorized immigration include: “travel bans and restrictions imposed on nationals of 39 countries; pauses in permanent visa issuance affecting 75 countries; new vetting guidelines that have led to a sizable drop in student visa issuance; a $100,000 application fee for H-1B high-skilled workers; diversion of staff from processing immigration applications to revetting recipients.” “Though many measures are framed as furthering the important goal of enhancing vetting and security, taken together, the broad moves suggest instead a comprehensive strategy to reduce legal immigration across much of the spectrum,” adds the report.
The new directive strategically shifts from delaying the processing of permanent residence applications to actively seeking to deny them, underscoring the administration’s broader attack on legal immigration.
The administration uses the battle against undocumented immigrants as a pretext to mount a far-reaching assault on legal immigration, which Trump, Stephen Miller, and their political base perceive as a fundamental threat.
The original Spanish version is here.
