The Trump administration moved on Friday to bar most temporary visa holders from converting to lawful permanent residence without first leaving the United States, in a sweeping change to longstanding immigration practice that will affect hundreds of thousands of pending green card applications.
A statement from US Citizenship and Immigration Services said that "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 did not define what would qualify as extraordinary; spokesperson Zach Kahler said additional guidance would be issued in the coming weeks.
Under existing rules, foreign nationals on H-1B, L-1, F-1 and a number of other temporary visa categories have generally been permitted to file an adjustment-of-status application from inside the United States once an immigrant visa number becomes available. Roughly 600,000 people a year apply for green cards through that process, the vast majority while continuing to work or study legally in the country.
Consular processing requires the applicant to travel to a US embassy or consulate in their home country, surrender their existing visa stamp, undergo a biometric interview and wait for issuance — a process that under current State Department backlogs can take six to fourteen months. Immigration lawyers said on Friday that switching to a consular-only model would effectively force most applicants to abandon employment or studies for the duration of the wait.
A former senior USCIS adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to comment publicly, said the move reflected an explicit instruction from senior administration officials to reduce the number of new green-card holders. "Permanent residency is a path to citizenship and they want to block that path for as many people as possible," the official said.
Industry reaction was sharp. The US Chamber of Commerce called the policy "unworkable" for technology and healthcare employers that depend on H-1B-to-green-card pipelines; several university associations warned that international graduate students would be deterred from completing US doctoral programmes. Immigration lawyers expect federal-court challenges to be filed within days.
The change is the latest of several immigration moves by the second Trump administration since January. Tougher enforcement of work-site checks and an expansion of the public-charge inadmissibility test have already begun to bite; a separate rule increasing application fees was finalised in April. The administration has also reduced refugee admissions and tightened visa-issuance criteria at consulates in several countries.