Trump Administration Reclassifies Getting A Green Card Without Leaving The Country As 'Extraordinary,' Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Immigrants Could Become Americans Without First Becoming Foreigners Again
WASHINGTON. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Thursday that adjusting one's immigration status from inside the United States, a routine administrative step taken by hundreds of thousands of people each year, would henceforth be treated as a rare and discretionary act of "administrative grace," available only in "extraordinary" circumstances, thereby resolving a long-standing concern that a person could complete the paperwork to live in America while continuing to live in America.
The policy memorandum, designated PM-602-0199 and titled with the unhurried confidence of a document that expects to be read by no one, instructs officers that the green card application long known as "adjustment of status" is no longer the ordinary path it has been for decades but an exceptional favor, and that the proper venue for becoming a lawful permanent resident is a United States consulate located in another country, ideally the one the applicant has spent years building a life away from.
Under the prior arrangement, a spouse of an American citizen, a worker on a valid visa, or a refugee granted protection could file a form, attend an interview, and receive a green card without surrendering their job, their lease, or their physical presence within the nation's borders. Under the new framework, officers are directed to weigh a long list of adverse factors and to regard the convenience of remaining in the country as itself a kind of presumption against the applicant, the logic being that anyone unwilling to leave America in order to be allowed to stay in America has not sufficiently demonstrated their desire to.
"Adjustment of status is a matter of discretion and administrative grace," the memorandum states, describing a benefit that the same government had been granting on a more or less clerical basis for more than seventy years. A source within the administration said the change simply restored the dignity of the consular process, in which applicants travel abroad at their own expense, wait an indefinite period in a country to which they may no longer have meaningful ties, and risk triggering the multiyear reentry bars that the act of departing can itself impose.
Immigration attorneys noted that the memo's central innovation was to convert the safest available immigration pathway into one of the riskiest without changing a single statute, accomplishing administratively what would otherwise have required Congress, and accomplishing it on a Thursday. The administration, which has separately moved to cap refugees, shorten student visas, and consolidate consular processing across entire continents, characterized the measure as a clarification.
At press time, officials confirmed that immigrants wishing to remain in the United States lawfully were now strongly encouraged to begin by leaving it.