U.S. permanent residents and foreign visitors to the U.S. are already being asked if they have applied for a “Trump Card Visa” on immigration forms, according to Wired.
This comes as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has begun implementing digital infrastructure for the new $5 million golden visa immigration program after President Donald Trump initially floated the idea in February.
The visa would allow wealthy people to buy residency in the U.S., but how it would work remains unclear, as federal legislation outlines how many permanent residency cards can be issued annually and who can receive them.
David Bier, writing for the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute in February, noted that Trump “cannot lawfully sell green cards in excess of Congress’s caps” and that “People will be paying for something Trump cannot provide.”
DOGE has gone from being tasked with increasing government productivity to handling essential parts of the U.S. immigration system within four months. Representatives from the Musk-aligned group have been working with officials from Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, as well as other agencies for several weeks on building out the golden visa program, Wired reported. DOGE associates Marko Elez and Edward Coristine are managing the project.
One area Musk’s team has been focusing on is how to plug current U.S. government systems to verifying travelers and immigration applications into what could become a separate website for the golden visa. The domain trumpcard.gov was registered in late March, according to records published by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The site has subdomains connected to CBP, the State Department, and the USCIS Electronic Immigration System, the central gateway for processing visa paperwork.
The Trump Card Visa is now also a part of the application for Global Entry, which is a program operated by CBP that allows pre-approved U.S. citizens, green card holders, and travelers from some countries to save time at the airport by entering via a fast lane.
Those who apply for Global Entry using a foreign passport are currently given an option to say that they have “submitted an application for a Trump Card Visa,” according to Wired.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick appeared on the All In podcast in March, claiming to have sold 1,000 gold cards, adding that Trump had estimated that they could sell one million cards in total. Lutnick said the concept was to let people buy the right to live in the U.S. and pay taxes on the income earned within the U.S.
Stuart Anderson, the executive director of the trade and immigration nonpartisan think tank the National Foundation for American Policy, told Wired that “It’s not clear what the legal basis is, unless they do something such as have Congress pass a bill through both houses and the president signs it, which is called legislation.”
