U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Friday that foreigners in the United States who want a green card must leave and apply in their home country, a sharp break from a process that for more than half a century allowed many people with legal status to complete permanent residence applications inside the United States.
The agency said there are extraordinary circumstances and unspecified exceptions, but the new rule could affect hundreds of thousands of green card applicants a year. People married to U.S. citizens, workers on visas, students, refugees and asylum-seekers have all been among those able to pursue permanent residence without first leaving the country. USCIS said, “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.”
For immigration lawyers, the announcement landed with immediate force. Flavia Santos Lloyd said her phone started ringing off the hook with clients worried about what the change would mean for cases they had expected to move forward. She said the shift “has a chilling effect” and that some cases she was prepared to proceed on now looked like ones she should “wait and see what’s going on.”
Charles Kuck, another immigration attorney, was blunter. He said the policy is “simply an attempt to try to limit and scare people away from the legal immigration process,” and called it “a scare tactic.” His criticism goes to the heart of the fight now forming around the rule: not whether USCIS can impose a new filing requirement, but whether the government is using procedure to discourage applicants who followed the legal route in the first place.
The announcement is also part of a broader pivot by the Trump administration toward legal pathways to immigration after focusing since last year mostly on migrants in the U.S. illegally. That shift has created confusion and concern among immigration lawyers and advocacy groups, who are now trying to figure out how the new requirement will work in practice and which applicants, if any, will qualify for exceptions. For now, the message from USCIS is clear: many green card seekers who are already in the United States will have to leave before they can finish the process.
