In yet another attempt to reduce the approval of residency or green card applications to reduce legal immigration, the Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) of the Donald Trump government announced that certain petitioners for permanent residence within the United States must return to their countries and do so through US consulates abroad.

We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people including spouses, children and parents of US citizens and permanent residents. Also from specialized professionals who already carry out work and research in the United States, although the government has clarified that they could be exempt.

It means the separation of families, without taking into account that the change will exacerbate the delay in processing applications that was months long, but now it is estimated that there could be years of waiting.

For example, green cards through an employer can take an average of 3.4 years. And in the case of adjustment due to family reunification, the waits range from 10 months to 15 years. It all depends on the visa category and the country of origin.

In the case of permanent residence cards, the delay is 1.2 million.

Who must leave the country will be determined on a case-by-case basis, the agency explained, but remaining in the United States will be the exception rather than the rule. The change is expected to affect students, temporary workers and other nonimmigrants currently in the United States.

And it has serious implications for those who stayed beyond the time authorized by their visas or entered without documents because leaving the country activates the three- and ten-year prohibitions on returning to the United States contemplated by the immigration law. If they remain in the United States they can activate expulsion for illegal presence, explained immigration lawyer David Leopold, past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

"This has never been about fixing the immigration system. It's about destroying all immigration and particularly attacking legal immigration," Leopold stated.

According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “in fiscal year 2024, nearly 1.4 million immigrants became lawful permanent residents (LPR, also known as green card holders).

Of the 1.4 million awarded in fiscal year 2024, 58% (783,800) of new LPRs received a green card within the United States, according to MPI. “The majority of these new permanent residents were spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens and green card holders (53%), followed by people who adjusted their refugee or asylee status (28%) or obtained a green card through employment (15%),” the MPI report says.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a researcher at the American Immigration Council, took to social media to react to the change. "Why is it important that people have to apply abroad? It could force people to leave their jobs, homes and families for weeks or months, at their own expense; consular decisions are virtually unappealable in court, even when they are manifestly wrong; and the delays can be much worse."

From the beginning, Trump's war has not only been against the undocumented but against legal immigration, especially of immigrants of color. We have seen this with the cancellation of TPS for nationals of various countries, humanitarian parole, the reduction in the number of asylees and refugees, and delays in the renewal of DACA permits. The idea is to delegalize them to make them deportable.

According to the MPI, some of those measures that have reduced authorized immigration are: "travel bans and restrictions imposed on nationals of 39 countries; suspensions in the issuance of permanent visas affecting 75 countries; new vetting guidelines that have caused a considerable drop in the granting of student visas; a $100,000 application fee for highly specialized workers with H-1B visas; and the diversion of personnel who process immigration applications to the background check of the beneficiaries.”

In the case of immigration adjustments for permanent residence, the strategy has been not to process them, but now, with the new guideline, the plan is to deny them.

And the war against undocumented immigrants has been the Trump government's excuse to undermine legal immigration that the president, his advisor, Stephen Miller, and his loyal base see as a threat to their survival.

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