The Trump administration announced Friday that foreign nationals living temporarily in the United States who want to become permanent residents will now be required to leave the country and apply for a green card from their home nations, upending a policy that has been in place for more than half a century and immediately raising alarms among immigration attorneys, advocacy groups, and the hundreds of thousands of people affected each year.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced the change without providing a date for when it would take effect, without clarifying whether pending applications already in the system would be covered, and without specifying how long applicants would need to remain abroad during the process. The agency said exceptions would be granted only in “extraordinary circumstances,” with individual USCIS officers deciding who qualifies.
For decades, foreign nationals with legal status inside the United States, including students, temporary workers, tourists, refugees, political asylum seekers, and spouses of American citizens, have been able to complete the entire green card application process without leaving. That pathway, known as adjustment of status, processed roughly 600,000 applications annually from people already living in the country.
Under the new framework, those applicants must instead travel to U.S. consular offices in their home countries and navigate the process from abroad, under State Department supervision.
“We’re returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly,” USCIS said in its statement. “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.”
Who Gets to Stay and Who Must Go
The agency carved out a category of people who may be permitted to apply from within the United States. Those who provide an “economic benefit” or serve a “national interest” could potentially remain in the country while their applications are processed, USCIS told the Associated Press in an emailed statement. The agency did not define those terms or explain what documentation would establish eligibility for the exemption.
USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler framed the policy as a systemic correction rather than a restrictive measure. He said it would reduce the number of people who stay in the country illegally after being denied residency, arguing that those who applied from abroad and were rejected would simply remain in their home countries rather than disappearing into the population.
“This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” Kahler said. “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the U.S. illegally after being denied residency.”
The agency also argued the change would free USCIS resources to focus on other priorities, including applications from victims of violent crimes, human trafficking survivors, and naturalization requests.
The Human Stakes
Critics of the policy drew a straight line between the announcement and the administration’s broader stated goal of reducing the number of people who obtain permanent residency and, through it, a path to American citizenship.
Doug Rand, a former senior adviser at USCIS during the Biden administration, said the intent was not ambiguous. “The goal of this policy is very explicit,” Rand said. “Senior officials in this administration have said over and over that they want fewer people to get permanent residency because permanent residency is a path to citizenship and they want to block that path for as many people as possible.”
Immigration attorneys warned of a specific danger for applicants from countries currently under U.S. travel bans or visa processing suspensions. The Trump administration has imposed outright entry bans on nationals from certain countries and paused visa processing for dozens of others. If a person from one of those countries is required to return home to apply for a green card, they face the possibility of being barred from re-entering the United States entirely, effectively stranding them abroad regardless of the strength of their immigration case.
In December 2025, the administration had already halted processing of green card and citizenship applications filed by nationals of countries on the travel ban list, a suspension that primarily affected immigrants from selected African and Asian nations already living legally in the United States and seeking to adjust their status. The Trump administration subsequently directed USCIS to freeze all immigration petitions, including permanent residency and citizenship applications, from nationals of 19 countries covered by an expanded travel ban announced in June, a move that followed the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., allegedly carried out by an Afghan national.
The Friday announcement compounds those earlier restrictions for affected nationals. People from travel-ban countries who had been waiting out the freeze on their applications inside the United States now face a new requirement to leave in order to apply, with no guarantee they will be permitted to return.
Nigeria and the Broader African Impact
The policy change carries particular weight for Nigerian nationals, who represent one of the largest African immigrant communities in the United States and who have been disproportionately affected by the administration’s sequential tightening of immigration access since Trump returned to office. Nigerians in the United States on student visas, work permits, and other temporary status who had been working toward permanent residency through the adjustment of status process now face a fundamental disruption to plans that may have been years in the making.
The broader pattern of restrictions, including the travel ban freeze, the green card processing suspension, and now the requirement to apply from abroad, has created compounding uncertainty for tens of thousands of African immigrants who entered the United States legally and have been following
A Policy Built to Reduce Numbers, Not Just Change Process
The administration’s stated rationale for the green card change, that it restores the original intent of immigration law and that temporary visitors should leave when their visits end rather than transitioning to permanent status from within the country, is legally coherent in a narrow sense. Consular processing, the mechanism that requires overseas applications, has always existed as one pathway to a green card. The adjustment of status process that the new policy effectively eliminates for most applicants was a parallel pathway that grew over decades as a practical accommodation.
What the stated rationale does not fully explain is the specific design of the new policy. If the goal were purely administrative efficiency or legal consistency, the administration would have provided clear timelines, explicit definitions of the economic benefit exception, and guidance on pending applications. It provided none of those. The vagueness appears functional rather than accidental — it maximizes uncertainty for applicants while giving USCIS officers discretionary authority over who qualifies for exceptions, a structure that history suggests will be applied inconsistently.
Rand’s assessment, that the explicit goal is fewer people obtaining permanent residency as a way of closing the path to citizenship, fits the evidence better than the agency’s framing. The Trump administration has been consistent and open about wanting to reduce both legal and illegal immigration. The green card policy change is one more instrument in a toolkit that has grown substantially since January, with each new restriction building on previous ones to create a cumulative barrier that is greater than any individual measure would suggest.
For the 600,000 people who apply for green cards from within the United States each year, and for the immigration lawyers who advise them, Friday’s announcement created urgent and unanswered questions. The lack of an implementation date, the absence of guidance on pending applications, and the undefined scope of the extraordinary circumstances exception mean that people who have built lives in the United States around a legal immigration pathway that existed last week must now navigate a changed landscape without the information needed to make basic decisions about where to live and how to proceed.
AP/Punchng
