DHS walked back its new adjustment of status policy, but confusion remains

On the Friday before Memorial Day, on the eve of a long weekend, the Trump administration announced that it was further gutting legal immigration. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t use this language. “This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes,” the agency said on X. “The era of abusing our nation’s immigration system is over.” A press release from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles legal immigration, provided few details. Following the Trump playbook, DHS seemingly intended to bury this news by announcing it at a time that hardly anyone would be paying attention.

In actuality, the change represented a major policy shift, ending the decades-old standard of letting people apply for green cards from inside the US, known as “adjustment of status.” And then a week later, on yet another Friday afternoon, DHS walked it back.

The confusion over DHS’s changes to adjustment of status — as well as the policy itself — are emblematic of the Trump administration’s stance toward legal immigration. DHS initially framed the shift as a straightforward fix to a broken system. But immigration lawyers said the move would be devastating for legal immigrants, upending the lives of hundreds of thousands of people each year, and potentially separating them from jobs and families for years — or indefinitely. The situation has been all the more chaotic due to a lack of clarity, yet another Trump administration hallmark.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced the change in a May 21 memo. As written, the document implies that most people who live in the US and want to apply for green cards — say, someone on an H-1B visa who is pursuing permanent residency — will have to leave the country to do so. But there appear to be some carve-outs. In a statement to CBS News, USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler said immigrants whose applications “provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest will likely be able to continue on their current path.” The memo itself, however, leaves that unclear.

“It’s kind of hinted that H-1Bs, it probably won’t apply to, but we don’t know that for sure,” said Todd Schulte, the 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’s an open question.”

The trickle of information related to the policy change — which, if implemented as written, would affect more than half a million people a year — is contributing to a sense of chaos and uncertainty for prospective green card applicants, including those on H-1B visas. H-1B workers constitute a major chunk of the tech workforce. During the last fiscal year, tech companies made up seven of the 10 biggest sponsors of H-1B visas. Amazon led the pack, with 12,391 H-1B approvals in the 2026 fiscal year alone.

There are two ways to apply for a green card. The first is through consular processing, which happens at US consulates in other countries. People who apply this way are issued immigrant visas that let them come over to the US, where they then apply for permanent residency. Because the US has an annual cap on immigrant visas per country, this can be a prolonged process for applicants from countries that send a lot of immigrants to the US. For example, a Mexican national applying for a family-based immigrant visa because their sibling is a US citizen can expect to wait 25 years, while a Filipino applying for the same reason would wait about 19 years. The second way to apply for a green card is through adjustment of status — which, unlike consular processing, doesn’t count against the per-country quotas for immigrant visas. Codified under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, adjustment of status lets people already living in the US apply for permanent residency without leaving the country. More than 600,000 people applied for adjustment of status during the 2023 fiscal year.

The USCIS memo seeks to eliminate this latter path to citizenship as much as possible, reserving it for “extraordinary circumstances.” In practice, this could mean that hundreds of thousands of people will have to leave the country each year just to apply for permanent residency. Because of the Trump administration’s other restrictions on legal immigration, including a moratorium on visas issued to nationals of 75 countries, that could mean that people who leave the country to apply for green cards will be stranded abroad. And for undocumented immigrants who marry US citizens, leaving the country to apply for permanent residency could in fact lead to them being prohibited from returning to the US for as long as a decade, due to bars legal on reentry for people with certain immigration violations.

That is, of course, assuming the policy is actually implemented as written, which DHS now claims it won’t be. In a statement issued to The New York Times last Friday, DHS said the change wouldn’t apply to all applicants. “This was just a reminder to officers of their discretionary authority, which has always existed on a case-by-case basis,” a spokesperson, who declined to be named, told the Times. A senior White House official told the Times that the change was a housekeeping matter, not a policy change. But these clarifications are coming through the media, not through follow-up memos, adding to the confusion. And before the backlash came, DHS reposted a Wall Street Journal writeup of the announcement that said “most” green-card applicants would have to leave the country, calling the policy “commonsense.”

Immigration lawyers have already seen changes on the ground. In a May 28th press call, Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the policy was implemented a day before the formal announcement. According to Joseph, USCIS adjudicators are now asking people applying for adjustment of status why they applied for adjustment of status instead of consular processing, whether there are any factors that would prevent them from consular processing, whether they still have family connections living in their home country, and why they decided not to return to their country when their period of stay expired.

This line of questioning, Joseph said, puts applicants in a defensive position. “There’s this assumption that you’re doing something wrong if you overstay [your visa] and apply for adjustment of status,” Joseph said. But applicants for adjustment of status are often eligible for a “period of stay” that allows them to remain in the country without accruing unlawful status — that is, without becoming immediately deportable — while their case is processed. But this change, which Joseph called “unprecedented,” could cause people to choose between falling out of legal status or leaving the country entirely.

“The Trump administration has been saying since the beginning that there are targets for arrests of undocumented individuals, and the only way they get there is to go after legal immigration,” Joseph said. “They don’t get to the numbers that they need if they’re only going after criminals.”

Uncertainty about how the policy will be implemented and who it applies to is leading to unease for prospective applicants — which may be the point.

“It has created a lot of concern and anxiety among individuals, among families, among companies, among employees, which may be part of the strategy in general,” Xiao Wang, the cofounder and CEO of Boundless Immigration, a company that helps immigrants apply for green cards, told The Verge.

Wang said the confusion around adjustment of status is indicative of the administration’s chaotic approach to immigration policy. “There’s both a clear sort of general direction this administration wants to take with immigration,” Wang said, and a habit of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. “It’s almost like a startup [minimum viable product] way of testing the waters around new policies.”

Wang pointed to the rollout of the $100,000 fee hike for H-1B visas as a comparable example. Like the green card change, the H-1B fee increase was announced on a Friday. “For a few days [after the announcement], every company frantically tried to fly everyone back home into the US before Monday morning,” Wang said, “and the government had to issue a number of clarifications over the weekend.”

After some backlash, the administration clarified that the H-1B fee increase would only apply to new applications, not to those already in the US.

Still, critics say the patchwork of changes to immigrant processing — even when they’re walked back — are part of a broader effort to keep immigrants out for good.

“There’s a lot of people who want to call it as it is, which is incredibly harmful and bad and scary, and at the highest levels, deeply, deeply detrimental to the US,” said Schulte. “They, through bureaucratic double-speak, are trying to hide the ball from what they’re doing.”