By admin 
Last month, the Trump administration sent the immigration-law world into a frenzy with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ sudden release of concerning the processing of green-card applications filed within the United States. The timing of the release—right before the long Memorial Day holiday weekend—its ambiguity, and the broad potential implications sparked exactly the sort of public confusion that the administration had likely hoped for.
Read more In His Shoes
Very basically, there are two procedures by which a person can receive permanent residence: If they are abroad, they can go through a U.S. Consulate under the State Department, and if they are in the U.S., they can “adjust” their status from whatever they had before—whether that was a student or work visa, temporary protected status, or nothing at all—to permanent residence from within the country. The latter is baked into the law as a discretionary grant that is, despite USCIS’s description of it as an “extraordinary relief,” closer to the norm. Homeland Security data from the first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year, the latest available, shows that of some 350,000 new permanent residencies issued, about 190,000—54 percent—were adjustments, which is in keeping with historical trends.
The memo takes the position that most people who have received a visa or parole or other temporary status should presumptively be in the country only for that period and for those purposes, should leave the country to go through consular processing if they opt to apply for permanent residence, and receive adjustment only through “administrative grace” in extraordinary circumstances. The actual guidance to USCIS officers, though, is short and vague, insinuating but not directly establishing that the implied intent of an applicant to stay in the country despite having gotten a nonimmigrant visa could be a mark against them, and instructing evaluators to assess all positive and negative factors in making a decision. It seems as if those most at risk of having their applications rejected would be people who have overstayed temporary visas, but there are no specific categories laid out.
Despite some apocalyptic social media pronouncements that visa holders would no longer be able to apply for residency in the U.S. or would categorically have to leave, the truth is, we don’t actually yet know how this policy will be applied, at least in part given its intentional vagueness and lack of public process. “People are asking me, ‘Can we still apply?,’ and I think the most important thing is, yes, people can still apply for a green card within the United States if they’re eligible. This isn’t a blanket prohibition. People are not required to leave the United States,” said Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council.
“I’ve had a lot of people who are already conditional permanent residents … that are very concerned, or people applying for naturalization,” said Matt Cameron, a well-known immigration attorney in the Boston area. “They think it applies to them, and I think that it’s a little harder to get your head around if you’re not familiar with the system.” He blamed both the administration and commentators who have overstated the significance of the policy online. Some attorneys have reported receiving so-called requests for evidence—demands that an applicant produce more documentation as the government considers their application—asking applicants to justify why they weren’t going through consular processing instead, but that’s hardly a signal of a widespread shift.
In that way, it shares some parallels with last year’s announcement that USCIS would begin taking factors like “anti-American ideologies or activities” into account when processing applications for visas, residency, and even naturalization. The news set off instant panic and the concern that any form of advocacy, even social media posts, in support of disfavored positions like Palestinian rights would derail a chance at a visa, though that doesn’t seem to have panned out.
This uncertainty is by design. Most Trump administration immigration policies and enforcement efforts can best be understood along two fronts: First, there are the on-the-ground practicalities, which range in impact from ineffective or limited to near-total. In the limited-impact bucket, we can look at the birthright citizenship order, which thus far has been blocked in court and looks headed to a final defeat at the Supreme Court. Even Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s highly visible mass-deportation campaign has been a relative failure in the context of Stephen Miller’s target of 1 million–plus deportations a year.
In the more-severe-impact category, we have things like the tearing down of the refugee program, which functionally does not exist anymore except as an avenue for small numbers of white South Africans to resettle in the United States. After SCOTUS set a precedent by signing off on the third version of Trump’s so-called Muslim ban during his first term, the administration has maintained an active travel ban for the totality of the current term, something that has mostly receded from the headlines other than blips about how, for example, swaths of fans will be unable to attend parts of the upcoming World Cup.
Read more Pete Hegseth Keeps Turning the Racism Dial Higher and Higher
Some of what undergirds these differences in effectiveness is that the executive has a lot more power to restrict who enters the country versus what happens to people already present; this, indeed, is part of what the memo concerns. The distinction between consular processing and adjustment is about more than where someone waits for a decision (though we of course can’t discount the incredibly disruptive effect of someone being asked to upend their life in the U.S. in exchange for the chance to reestablish it).
If a person gets an initial denial of adjustment of status, that can be contested; they can pursue another status or, in the worst case, fight a removal process in immigration court, even potentially seek redress in the federal courts. Cameron said he had told some clients that they would present all their positive factors before USCIS but might prepare to defend their cases in immigration courts, where a similar policy does not exist. A consular denial, meanwhile, is almost impossible to contest.
None of this has to actually force people out of the country for this policy to be successful in Miller’s book, because Trump’s immigration policymaking has another objective: It is a narrative-building endeavor. Several months on from the earlier “anti-American” memo, I’ve seen no specific reports of an immigration benefit actually denied on that basis, at least in part because USCIS officers would probably realize that this is an obvious First Amendment land mine. But the notion that the threat is out there remains.
The same is true of Trump’s threatened mass-denaturalization campaign, which has yet to take place in the sort of way initially threatened. The fear, though, is still very real.
In the event that the administration does start broadly denying visa status adjustment to people otherwise eligible, the memo itself is legally vulnerable across a number of fronts, starting with the fact that it is a single memo—not a federal rule that went through notice and comment, not even an interim final rule—that targets how the majority of people receive residency. That makes it a prime target for a claim under the Administrative Procedure Act, which limits the ability of executive agencies to engage in regulatory actions that are arbitrary or capricious; during Trump’s first term in particular, immigration policies were struck down over and over again on APA grounds, including the against Trump’s attempted termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
As Cameron details on his blog, USCIS is pointedly citing only one immigration court precedent in its memo while ignoring other decisions that suggest that adjustment of status should generally be granted absent other adverse factors. Referencing the applicant on whom that single precedent was based, Cameron notes that this is not how the system was designed. “If the model that you’re using is ‘Treat every applicant as if they are a dirtbag who abandoned their family and overstayed a removal order and lied on their visa application and got into marriage fraud,’ that’s not how it’s supposed to work,” he said.
Read more One Weird Trick Sam Alito Used to Kill the Voting Rights Act