The Trump administration has quietly halted the processing of green card applications for certain individuals, including immigrants granted refugee or asylum status, citing that “additional screening and vetting” was needed to identify “potential fraud, public safety, or national security concerns,” CBS News reported Tuesday.
According to the report, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has paused the adjustment of status process for refugees and asylees seeking lawful permanent residency. These individuals have already demonstrated that they are either unwilling or unable to return to their home countries due to persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.
Experts see this as part of the Trump administration’s increasing vetting of immigrants.
“What we might be seeing in this is a kind of reorientation of USCIS,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute‘s U.S. immigration policy program.
The move by the administration adds further delays and uncertainty to an already lengthy and complex process for those who seek safety in the U.S.
“Under the Biden administration, there had been really record high levels of processing of applications, including for green cards and naturalization, it was prioritizing adjudicating these applications,” Bush-Joseph told Documented. “Now under Trump, we’re seeing this focus on vetting and fraud detection, and that comes in coordination with restrictions on access to protection and status in the United States,” she added.
This week, the Trump administration announced it will revoke temporary legal status for roughly 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans as part of the CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) humanitarian parole program. Last month, the administration also paused all immigration applications from Latin America and Ukraine under Biden-era programs.
Bush-Joseph noted that it remains unclear whether this specific policy change will affect other green card applicants. However, she pointed out that the Trump administration’s actions, which have included firing probationary employees and encouraging retirements across federal agencies like USCIS, could reduce the agency’s workforce and lead to processing delays.
“At the end of the day, in a lot of these categories for immigration benefits, the amount of personnel and resources dedicated to adjudication determines how quickly these move under any administration,” she said.
