A Green Card Pathway That Existed For Decades Is Changing
Imagine living in the United States legally for years.
You studied there. Built a career. Started a family. Paid taxes. Followed every rule.
Then you are told that to continue your green card process, you may have to leave the country first.
That is the reality hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their families say they are now facing after a major policy change issued by US Citizenship and Immigration Services on May 21, 2026.
For more than 50 years, across every administration, Republican and Democrat alike, most immigrants living legally in the US could complete the entire green card process without ever leaving the country. That practice ended with a single memo.
Why The Adjustment Of Status System Matters
The process is known as Adjustment of Status. It allows eligible immigrants already living legally in the United States to apply for permanent residency from within the country.
In 2023 alone, roughly 600,000 people received green cards through this pathway. Former USCIS officials estimate that around half of all green card applicants each year use this route rather than applying through a US consulate overseas.
The groups affected include students, temporary workers, exchange visitors, spouses of US citizens, and people granted emergency protection or temporary shelter in the US who entered legally.
USCIS says exceptions remain for extraordinary circumstances, national interest cases, and applicants providing significant economic benefit. But those terms remain almost entirely undefined, decided at the discretion of individual immigration officers with no clear criteria and no meaningful right of appeal.
The Catch-22 At The Center Of The Debate
Critics argue that the most devastating part of this policy is not the requirement to apply abroad.
It is where some applicants would be expected to go.
In January 2026, the Trump administration suspended immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries. A separate travel ban imposes outright entry restrictions on 39 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Haiti.
The new policy tells immigrants from those countries to leave the US and apply at a US consulate in their home country. But the consulates in those countries are not processing immigrant visas. There is nowhere to apply.
World Relief, one of the country’s largest humanitarian organisations, stated it plainly: “If families are told that the non-citizen family member must return to his or her country of origin to process their immigrant visa, but immigrant visas are not being processed there, it’s a Catch-22. These policies will effectively create an indefinite separation of families.”
“The purpose of this policy is exclusion,” said Doug Rand, a former senior USCIS official. “Remember that Trump has banned people from over 100 countries from returning to the US, so forcing them to go abroad for consular processing is no pathway at all.”
Families, Careers, And Years Of Waiting
Immigration attorneys across the United States are advising most clients not to leave unless absolutely necessary.
Once an applicant departs, there is no guarantee of when they will return.
Some employment-based applicants already face the longest waiting periods in the immigration system. Indian applicants in certain categories face green card backlogs estimated at up to 70 years, driven by per-country caps that limit how many green cards any single nationality can receive each year. For those applicants, leaving the US does not accelerate the process. It simply removes them from the life they have built while the wait continues.
There are also legal consequences most applicants are unaware of. Certain immigrants who leave after periods of unlawful presence can be barred from re-entering the United States for three or ten years. A decision intended to continue a green card process could trigger a bar that makes returning legally impossible.
The result is uncertainty for people who already have jobs, mortgages, businesses, spouses, and children in the United States.
A report by World Relief and the National Association of Evangelicals found that by 2029, 910,000 US citizen children will be separated from one or both parents by existing detention and deportation policies, and 272,000 US citizens will be separated from their spouses. This new policy adds to those numbers, forcing families who are currently living together legally to separate in order to comply with the law.
The Economic Consequences
The debate extends well beyond immigration advocates.
Technology leaders, universities, healthcare systems, and major employers are watching closely.
Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and one of the world’s leading AI researchers, called the policy “a capricious attack on legal immigration” that will “hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.”
Immigration advocacy group FWD.us warned the policy will “create chaos and impose massive costs on immigrants who have lived and worked legally in the United States for many years,” including top scientists, founders of billion-dollar companies, and skilled professionals that American industries depend on.
Supporters of the policy argue that temporary visas were never intended to serve as a bridge to permanent residence and that consular processing abroad reflects the original intent of immigration law. USCIS describes adjustment of status as a matter of “administrative grace” that should be an exception, not the rule.
A New Chapter In America’s Immigration Debate
For years, America’s immigration debate focused almost entirely on illegal immigration.
This policy shifts the conversation to something different.
Legal immigration.
The people affected are not crossing borders unlawfully. Many entered through approved programs, obtained visas, attended universities, accepted jobs, or married US citizens. They are the immigrants the system was designed to welcome.
The central question is no longer whether they followed the rules.
It is whether the rules are changing while they are already inside the process.
For hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their families, that question may become the defining immigration story of 2026.
By Shizza Farooqui
SOURCESAssociated Press, NPR, USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0199, PBS NewsHour, CBS News, Time Magazine, Stateline, World Relief, National Association of Evangelicals, Semafor, FWD.us, Economic Policy Institute, Cato Institute, American Immigration Lawyers Association
