The Trump administration has paused all immigration applications filed by immigrants from 19 countries it restricted from travel to the United States earlier this year, halting green card and U.S. citizenship processing for broad swaths of people, according to agency officials.
The pause applies to people from Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Haiti, Somalia and others banned by Mr. Trump in June who are seeking status from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the immigration system. The list includes some of the poorest and most unstable nations in the world.
The move deepens the remarkable crackdown on immigration after a shooting of two National Guard members in Washington last week. Authorities have identified Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan who obtained asylum in April, as the suspect in that attack. The changes have already choked off many of the United States’ remaining legal immigration pathways, but the application pause indicated that the administration is not done.
“The Trump administration is making every effort to ensure individuals becoming citizens are the best of the best. Citizenship is a privilege, not a right,” said Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, who confirmed the pause on Tuesday. “We will take no chances when the future of our nation is at stake.”
The pause applies to various immigration processes, most consequentially green card applications and U.S. citizenship requests. Immigration lawyers reported cancellations of naturalization ceremonies and interviews for immigration status, and said they were left puzzled on Tuesday as immigrants were turned away from interviews for green cards and other forms of relief with no explanation.
Ana Maria Schwartz, an immigration lawyer in Texas, said two of her firm’s clients from Venezuela learned upon arrival at a Citizenship and Immigration Services field office in Houston that their interviews had been canceled with no clear reason. Other lawyers have reported that applicants who had waited for months, sometimes years, for their interviews were suddenly finding their appointments removed from the system with no guidance on how to proceed, she said.
The pause will put further strain on a system that has already been struggling with backlogs, she said.
“Everything is being put on hold,” Ms. Schwartz said. “It is just like a traffic jam, and it is just going to get worse and worse and worse.”
Elissa J. Taub, an immigration lawyer in Tennessee, said a physician represented by her law partner had been scheduled to take his oath of citizenship and go through his naturalization ceremony this week but was notified it had been canceled. The client, who has a U.S. green card, was born in Iran but moved to Canada as a teenager and had been able to continue traveling despite the ban because of his Canadian citizenship, Ms. Taub said.
“We have been hearing through our network of immigration lawyers that this is not an isolated case,” she said. “Folks from Venezuela and Iran are having their naturalization oath ceremonies canceled.”
Trump administration officials had announced broad changes to the immigration system in recent days, including reviewing green cards provided to people from the travel ban countries, pausing asylum decisions and reassessing the asylum grants provided during the Biden administration.
Department of Homeland Security officials have framed the major changes as necessary to increase vetting of individuals already in the country.
“Nothing is off the table until every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a social media post this week.
Mr. Lakanwal arrived in the United States under the Biden administration as part of a program that allowed entry to Afghan nationals fleeing the country after the Taliban’s takeover in 2021.
Already, the new rules announced last week could affect more than 1.5 million people who had asylum applications pending, and more than 50,000 who had received asylum grants during the Biden administration.
It was unclear how many people from the countries on the travel ban list were waiting for various immigration benefits.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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