DHS released the new ethics policy, but confusion remains

On the Friday before Memorial Day, on the eve of the long weekend, the Trump administration announced that it would increase legal immigration. The Department of Homeland Security did not use this language. “This policy allows our immigrants to work as they wish instead of promoting barriers,” the agency said. said on X. “The time to persecute our immigrants is over.” A press release from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees legal immigration, did not elaborate. Following Trump’s playbook, DHS appears to want to put the news on hold by announcing it at a time when no one is listening.

In fact, the change represented a major policy shift, ending decades of allowing people to apply for green cards within the US, known as the “policy shift.” And a week later, one Friday evening, DHS struck back.

The confusion over DHS’s transition to a new role — and the process itself — is a sign of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration. DHS initially framed the change as a direct fix to a broken system. But immigration lawyers said the move would be devastating to immigrants, upending the lives of thousands of people each year, and separating them from jobs and families for years — or forever. The situation has become more complicated due to lack of clarity, and another symptom of the Trump administration.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced the change on May 21 memo. As written, the bill means that many people who live in the US and want to apply for green cards — say, someone with an H-1B visa who is seeking residency — will have to leave the country to do so. But it seems there are some mistakes. In words to CBS newsUSCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said immigrants whose jobs “provide economic benefits or otherwise are in the national interest may continue their current path.” The memo itself, however, leaves this unclear.

“It sounds like H-1Bs, they might not work, but we don’t know that,” said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration reform organization. founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives in 2013. “I think it’s fair to say that this is an open question.”

The flood of information surrounding the proposed policy change — which, if enacted as written, could affect more than half a million people annually — is creating confusion and uncertainty for prospective green card applicants, including H-1B visa holders. H-1B workers make a large part of the modern workforce. In the last fiscal year, technology companies made up seven of the 10 largest contributors to H-1B visas. Amazon led the pack, with 12,391 H-1B approvals in fiscal year 2026 alone.

There are two ways to apply for a green card. The first is through the embassy, ​​which is done at US embassies in other countries. People who apply for these visas are issued immigrant visas that allow them to come to the US, where they apply for permanent residency. Because the US has an annual cap on visas for each immigrant, this can be a long process for applicants from countries that send large numbers of immigrants to the US. For example, Mexico is applying for a family visa because his brother is a US citizen. can wait 25 yearswhile a Filipino applying for the same reason can wait about 19 years. The second way to apply for green cards is to change the status – which, unlike the consular, does not count for each country of entry visas. Enacted under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the change in status allows people who already live in the US to apply for permanent residency without leaving the country. More than 600,000 people applied for a change of scenery in 2023.

The USCIS memo aims to eliminate this last step to citizenship as much as possible, keeping it “extraordinary.” In practice, this would mean that hundreds of thousands of people will leave the country every year just to apply for a residence permit. Because of the Trump administration other restrictions on legal immigrationincluding the ban on visas issued to citizens of 75 countries, which would mean that people who leave the country to apply for green cards will be lost abroad. And for undocumented immigrants married to US citizens, leaving the country to apply for permanent residency can result in being barred from re-entering the US for up to ten years, because acceptable bars for re-entry for people with other outgoing violations.

That is, assuming the policy is implemented as written, which DHS now says it will never be. In a document issued to The New York Times Last Friday, DHS said the change would not apply to all applicants. “This was a reminder to the officers of their leadership, which is always there,” the spokesman, who declined to be named, said. Time. A White House official told reporters Time that change was a housekeeping issue, not a policy change. But these explanations are coming through the media, not through follow-up, which is adding to the confusion. And before that, DHS they were sent back a Wall Street Journal the writing of the announcement said that “many” applicants for green cards have left the country, and called the law “good.”

Immigration lawyers have already seen the changes on the ground. In a press conference on May 28, Jeff Joseph, President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the plan was put in place a day before the announcement. According to Mr. Joseph, USCIS judges are now asking people who are applying to change their status why they applied for a change of status instead of a consular adjustment, if there are any factors that would prevent them from renewing their consular status, whether they still have family living in their country of origin, and why they chose not to return to their country when it is over.

This line of questioning, Joseph said, puts applicants on the defensive. “There is a perception that you are doing something wrong if you overstay (the visa) and apply for a renewal,” Joseph said. But immigration applicants often qualify for a “period of stay” that allows them to remain in the country without becoming illegal — that is, without immediate deportation — while their case is being processed. But this change, which Yosef said “has never happened before,” could make people choose between breaking the law or leaving the country.

“The Trump administration has been saying from the beginning that there are plans to detain people who are undocumented, and the only way they’re going to get there is to go to another country,” Joseph said. “They’re not going to get the numbers they need if they’re just going after criminals.”

Uncertainty about how the process will be implemented by those involved is causing concern among potential applicants – which may exist.

“It has caused a lot of stress and anxiety among people, among families, among companies, among workers, which can be part of the whole process,” Xiao Wang, founder and CEO of Boundless Immigration, a company that helps immigrants apply for green cards, said. Seaside.

Wang said that the confusion about the change in culture is a sign of the turmoil in the management of immigration. “There’s a clear strategy that the agency wants to follow with immigration,” Wang said, as well as a tendency to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. “It’s like a basic (cheap) way to test the water for new principles.”

Wang showed the release of An increase of $100,000 for H-1B visas as a comparative example. As with the green card changes, the H-1B wage increase was announced on Friday. “For a few days (after the announcement), every company He desperately tried to fly everyone back home into the US before Monday morning,” Wang said, “and the government provided the details at the end of the week.”

After some back-and-forth, the administration clarified that the H-1B rate hike will only apply to new applications, not to those already in the US.

However, critics say that the immigration reforms – even if they are returned – are part of an effort to keep immigrants from doing good.

“There are a lot of people who want to call it what it is, which is very harmful and bad and dangerous, and at the highest level, very damaging to the US,” Schulte said. “They, through double talk, are trying to hide the ball from what they are doing.”