In just one year, President Trump has blocked millions of immigrants from entry, tightened rules that penalize people who might need government assistance, and revoked protections for immigrants already here.
Why it matters: Trump won his first term by promising to stop illegal immigration. Now his second term is reshaping legal immigration.
- Trump's biggest enforcer in this fight is the small office of fee-funded paper pushers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, led by former ICE prosecutor Joseph Edlow, a veteran of Trump's first term.
- "He's not a squish," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that promotes restricting immigration.
The big picture: Trump has regularly been publicly supportive of legal immigration. But a steady stream of policy changes from his administration has made legal immigration much harder just a year into his second term, with more to come.
1. The vetting is getting tougher, with a bigger enforcement budget
- Edlow plans to make the citizenship test harder, and USCIS has raised the bar for good moral character in the screening process. Applicants are being asked to show their community ties and "positive attributes and contributions."
- USCIS is expanding its fraud detection center in Georgia, as well as increasing its neighborhood and site visits to enhance screening.
- In addition to partnering more closely with ICE to make arrests, USCIS has sent almost 200,000 court appearance notices to people who are potentially eligible to be deported.
2) Travel bans are freezing out applicants
- The pauses on application processing for asylum and immigration cases for nationals on the expanded travel ban list are shutting out as much as 20% of the people in the process for legal immigration, according to a review by the CATO Institute.
- Passport holders from travel ban-listed countries already in the U.S. now cannot apply for immigration benefits, renew or change status. Those outside the country either have an outright bar on entry or increased restrictions.
3) Work visas have shorter shelf lives
- Foreigners legally working in the country will also see increased vetting with a new rule that shortens the length of employment authorization documents from 5 years of valid status to 18 months.
- The agency said this change will fight fraud and "identify individuals with potentially harmful intent."
4) Needing government help will count against you
- When reviewing immigration cases, a new public charge rule will weigh whether an applicant would ever need to use social safety net programs. It uses that determination as a negative factor on an application.
- Undocumented immigrants do not have access to social programs like food assistance (SNAP) or Medicaid, but some legal immigrants or U.S. citizens in a mixed-status household can access them.
- The new rule builds on an executive order signed by Trump to end "all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens" and a broader search for fraud in benefits programs by the federal government.
5) Big humanitarian programs are ending, and roughly a million people have lost legal status
- Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants from 11 countries as each renewal deadline came up for consideration.
- This includes about 76,000 people from Honduras and Nicaragua, who have been covered under the program since 1998. An additional 500,000 people lost legal status with the termination of a parole program called CHNV, short for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
- These people are now vulnerable to deportation if they don't leave the country before the end dates of their current programs.
What they're saying: "President Trump's top priority always has been and always will be whatever is best for the American people," said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson.
- "His commonsense changes to our immigration system reflect that priority while still ensuring all sectors have the legal workforce they need to be successful or to train American workers as necessary."
The bottom line: "You can more easily hit the 'STOP' button at USCIS, than you can hit big 'GO' button at ICE," said Mike Howell, president of the conservative Oversight Project.
- "If these standards are actually enforced, we'll know in the years to come, because there should be a significant drop off in naturalizations. I'm talking at least like 50%" Howell said.
