Green card applicants seeking legal residency through a spouse now face possible deportation as President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown deepens.
A new Trump administration policy allows federal immigration authorities to initiate removal proceedings for immigrants without legal status who seek lawful permanent residency through a spouse or other family members.
“Family-based petition accords no immigration status nor does it bar removal,” warns a new guidance issued by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Monday.
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The policy took effect immediately, and also applies to applicants with pending requests, NBC News reported.
Family-based visa and green card petitions—which require a U.S. citizen or green card holder to sponsor the applicant—have long been a key pathway to legal residency for immigrants.
But since launching his White House bid more than a decade ago on a tough-on-immigration platform, Trump has repeatedly slammed family-based immigration, deriding it as “chain migration.”
That’s despite first lady Melania Trump sponsoring green cards for her Slovenian-born parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs. The president’s in-laws in 2018 obtained U.S. citizenship via the very pathway he called a “disaster” that same year.
A USCIS alert announcing the new policy said, “Fraudulent, frivolous, or otherwise non-meritorious family-based immigrant visa petitions erode confidence in family-based pathways to lawful permanent resident (LPR) status and undermine family unity in the United States.”
The agency, under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rolled out the new policy amid a mounting backlog of 11.3 million pending immigration cases, Newsweek reported.
That includes 2.9 million I-130 petitions—the first step in obtaining a green card through a spouse or family—according to an NBC News analysis of USCIS data. Over half a million I-130 petitions were reportedly filed in the first six months of 2025.
The new guidance leaves both undocumented immigrants and those who entered the country legally vulnerable to deportation proceedings, Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told NBC News.
She pointed to people whose visas expire while they await green card decisions, which can take months or years, as well as Dreamers and tens of thousands of immigrants whose legal status is at risk Trump moved to cancel the Temporary Protected Status program expanded under the Biden administration.
When reached for comment, USCIS told the Daily Beast, “USCIS is dedicated to ensuring integrity in the U.S. immigration system through enhanced screening and vetting to deter, detect, and disrupt immigration fraud and threats to our national security and public safety.”
