Trump administration will make green card hopefuls return to home countries before applying

Immigrants seeking green cards will have to return first to their home countries and wait despite years of potential backlogs, the Trump administration announced Friday. 

“An alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply,” Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a statement. 

The change would apply to workers on temporary visas, as well as to people living here illegally but hoping for legal status through sponsorship by relatives such as spouses or children who are U.S. citizens.

The immigration advocacy group FWD.us said the new policy “will create chaos and impose massive costs on immigrants who have lived and worked legally in the United States for many years” in a statement to Stateline. 

Business leaders said the move is disruptive to tech industries that rely on foreign workers who have temporary visas and sometimes hope for a green card and eventual citizenship.  

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Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and an adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford University, in an X post called the change “a capricious attack on legal immigration” that will “hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.” 

“This is the worst imaginable way to disrupt important work for the country and pretend you’re fighting some loophole,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist Nick Davidov wrote on X, saying at least three large startups in his portfolio would be hurt by the policy. 

The so-called green cards represent a status called lawful permanent residence, a legal immigration status that can lead to citizenship. 

The administration’s intent, Kahler said in the statement, is to prevent temporary visitors from seeking permanent legal status while they’re in the United States. 

“Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose,” Kahler wrote. “Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process.”

Those affected include many tech workers on temporary visas that might lead to green cards. 

“This includes top scientists in our universities, founders of billion dollar companies,” Davidov wrote in his post, referring to temporary visas such as O-1 (extraordinary ability) and H-1B (highly skilled specialties) visas that can lead to citizenship with employer sponsorship. FWD.us estimates H-1B visa holders and their families in the United States number about 1.3 million. 

People from India would have to wait through years of backlogs if they stopped working and went home to apply for green cards, and people from Russia would be unable to apply at all because there’s no U.S. embassy there, he noted. 

The USCIS announcement did refer to “extraordinary” circumstances that might allow continued processing of green cards in the United States but did not elaborate. 

According to a policy memo issued Friday, USCIS agents “must consider and weigh all the relevant evidence” and determine “if approval of the alien’s adjustment of status application is in the best interest of the United States.” 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at [email protected].