When the Trump administration announced its plans to change the way green cards are acquired, I immediately took notice. As the husband of a foreign-born spouse, this is a process I have direct experience with. Under this new approach, many people who are already in the U.S. temporarily and want to apply for a green card would be expected to leave the country and apply through a U.S. consulate abroad. In recent years, the U.S. has granted more than a million green cards annually. In FY 2024, the number was about 1.36 million, and more of those went to people already inside the U.S. than to new arrivals. So this will have fairly significant ripple effects. Why? I’ll use Denisa and me as an example.
We met in September of 2000. We had our first date in November, and we were married in April of 2001. At the time, she was here on a student visa that restricted what she could do for work and had a very definite end date. As soon as we were back from our honeymoon, we started filling out the paperwork for her student visa to be changed to a green card, which would allow her to stay indefinitely.
It wasn’t an easy process, and this was in the days prior to 9/11.
After we sent the application in, we waited. And waited. As I recall, at some point we had to pay an additional fee to extend or renew part of the pending process (perhaps work authorization or another temporary document? It’s been a while, so my memory’s fuzzy) because the government had taken so long to process the case. Once they finally finished processing her paperwork, we had to go up to Salt Lake for an in-person interview, bringing joint bank statements, wedding pictures, photos of our apartment, and more. Anything and everything that would confirm yes, we were actually married. This took about a year, maybe more.
Under these new guidelines, if Denisa wanted that green card, she would have had to go back to Slovakia after we were married and fill out the paperwork there. That might sound simple enough, but for us, it would have meant living apart for the next year, right after we were married. Just at the time when a new couple should be able to focus on learning the ropes of married life, we’d essentially have to remain single until the process was complete.
The Trump administration is trying to claim this has been a longstanding part of the process, and they’re just returning things to how it’s supposed to work. This is misleading. True, immigration officials have always had discretion over these applications. But that’s not the same thing as saying the whole process was only supposed to be used in rare cases. For decades, people like Denisa and me followed this path because it was the normal, legal thing to do. Denisa had entered the country legally. We got married legally. We filed the paperwork the legal way. We weren’t sneaking through a loophole. We were doing exactly what the system told us to do. And even then, it wasn’t as if the government just handed Denisa permanent status and walked away. Because we’d been married for less than two years, her first green card was conditional. We had to prove the marriage again later to remove those conditions.
This is another example of the Trump administration taking a process that was already difficult and making it more punishing, not just for immigrants, but for the American citizens who love them. My heart goes out to anyone who has to deal with this under the new changes. A process that was already byzantine has only been made more difficult, more expensive, and more disruptive as well. That’s disappointing.