Donald Trump is seizing on the shooting of two national guard members, allegedly by an Afghan man, to press his immigration crackdown still farther. In the aftermath of the attack, which left guard member Sarah Beckstrom dead and colleague Andrew Wolfe in critical condition, Trump directed US Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause all pending asylum applications.
USCIS followed up that announcement with more seismic shifts to immigration policy. This is how the White House is reshaping the process for requesting asylum, green cards and citizenship.
Pause on asylum claims
Tuesdsay’s memo leads with a change that USCIS director Joseph Edlow first announced last week in a tweet: the agency is pausing consideration of the roughly 1.5 million asylum applications before it.
The pause does not appear to apply to the immigration courts, where most asylum cases are currently playing out.
The change marks a sharp reversal for the Trump administration, which had worked at a breakneck pace to clear the asylum backlog as quickly as possible. USCIS’s most recently published quarterly report shows that the number of completed asylum cases nearly quintupled to 135,091, compared to the same period last year. The number of denials rose six times, to 6,850, while the backlog shrank modestly after increasing since 2021.
Heightened scrutiny of migrants from 19 ‘high-risk’ countries
The memo also directs USCIS to pause consideration of a broad range of immigration benefits – which appeared to include work authorizations, green cards, naturalization and sponsoring family members – for citizens or nationals of 19 specific countries that the administration previously classified as “high-risk”. That change has sweeping implications, appearing to block migrants from those countries from applying for work authorizations, green cards, naturalization or sponsor visas for family members.
The blacklisted countries include Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Myanmar, the Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Venezuela and Yemen.
Nationals from those countries already face travel restrictions to the United States. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said earlier this week she was recommending an expansion of that list to roughly 30 countries.
Review of approved immigration applications
The USCIS memo also orders a “comprehensive re-review” of applications from all migrants from those 19 countries who secured immigration benefits since 20 January 2021 – the day that Joe Biden took office. The unprecedented mass double-checking of immigration benefit applications may require “a potential interview and, if necessary, a re-interview, to fully assess all national security and public safety threats along with any other related grounds of inadmissibility or ineligibility”, the memo says.
The review of those applications will allow USCIS officials to check if applicants have been identified in federal terrorist screening databases or are unable to establish their identity, the memo says. It is already standard practice to check whether applicants are terrorists or lying about their identities, however.
Trump has repeatedly insisted that the Biden administration failed to properly screen entering Afghan migrants in 2021, as the US withdrew from the two-decade war there. Many of the Afghans who were allowed to relocate to the US at that time, including Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the Washington shooting suspect, had collaborated with the US military.
“There was no vetting or anything, they came in unvetted,” Trump said last week. “And we have a lot of others in this country, we’re going to get ‘em out. But they go cuckoo. Something happens to them.”
But Denise Gilman, the co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas in Austin, said USCIS investigations of Afghan asylum applicants involved a thorough screening, including interviews that typically lasted six to eight hours.
“I personally sat in those interviews,” Gilman said. “Over and over again, I thought how ridiculous the expenditure of resources was on these cases for people we had decided needed to be evacuated.”
All these changes are likely to get challenged in federal court – a recurring theme with Trump’s immigration enforcement overhaul. Gilman expects the challengers to ultimately prevail and asylum claims to once again move forward.
“But in the meantime, there’s going to be a long pause and the backlog is going to grow,” she said. “In the meantime, people are hurt and the administration gets its way.”
