The Trump administration has made sweeping changes to the immigration system in the wake of last week’s shooting of two National Guard members in Washington.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan who received asylum in April, has been charged in the attack, which killed Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and seriously wounded Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe. Mr. Lakanwal has pleaded not guilty.
President Trump has cited the shooting to deepen his crackdown on immigration. In the last week, officials have issued a number of policies upending the legal pathways for immigrants to enter or live in the United States, particularly for Afghans and other people from countries subject to Mr. Trump’s travel ban.
For now, the new rules halt the ability of Afghans to obtain visas to come to the United States. But they also indefinitely prevent a broader swath of migrants already in the country from moving ahead with efforts to obtain benefits like green cards and citizenship. And they have halted decisions on asylum applications for people regardless of their nationality.
It is unclear how long the administration will pause decisions on asylum and other benefit applications. On Tuesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the hold would be “lifted by the U.S.C.I.S. director through a subsequent memorandum.”
Here are the major changes and who is affected:
Asylum applicants
The federal government has frozen decisions on asylum applications that have been filed with U.S.C.I.S. by migrants currently inside the country. That benefit is granted to migrants seeking protection in the United States because they fear persecution in their home countries.
The hold could affect as many as 1.5 million people who had pending applications with U.S.C.I.S. as of June, according to the latest government data.
The change does not appear to prevent people from submitting new asylum applications if they are applying within the United States. But decisions on new filings would be paused, immigration lawyers said.
Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy organization, said the halt on asylum decisions could be extremely disruptive for people who have already been waiting months or years for a ruling.
“For people who have been stuck in that backlog but finally made it to the front of the line, this is a personal tragedy,” she said.
Trump administration officials have also said they will review the more than 50,000 asylum applications that were approved by the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration.
Immigrants from countries on the travel ban list
Foreign nationals from the 19 countries subject to the president’s travel ban have been affected by a host of other changes in recent days.
The administration has put on hold immigration applications filed by people from those countries already living in the United States, meaning their efforts to obtain benefits such as U.S. citizenship and green cards have been halted.
The pause affects citizens from the 12 countries that Mr. Trump subjected to a travel ban in June: Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
It also applies to citizens from seven countries with partial travel restrictions: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Citizens of those countries cannot enter the United States permanently or receive certain visas.
In a memo, U.S.C.I.S. said the hold affects benefits such as green card renewals, which legal permanent residents typically need to obtain every 10 years.
The pause on benefits has also effectively halted the citizenship process for migrants from the 19 countries subject to the travel ban, according to immigration advocates and officials.
In recent days, lawyers for migrants who have applied for benefits have said that some of their clients have already had their green card interviews or naturalization ceremonies canceled with little explanation.
Migrants from those countries who entered the country since the start of the Biden administration and were approved for benefits such as green cards, asylum and citizenship will also be subject to a reassessment, “to fully assess all national security and public safety threats along with any other related grounds of inadmissibility or ineligibility,” according to U.S.C.I.S.
Those people could be required to complete additional interviews with officers to defend their applications if federal officials find any potential discrepancies, said Jeff Joseph, the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. That could mean more people are subject to deportation, he added.
“They’re going to be looking for everything that they can do to screen up people and put them in removal proceedings,” Mr. Joseph said.
Applying for benefits like green cards or citizenship could also take longer for other applicants, regardless of their countries of origin, because immigration officers will be reassessing certain benefits that have already been approved, said Sarah Pierce, a former policy analyst at U.S.C.I.S. who now serves as the director of social policy at the center-left think tank Third Way.
“This is an agency that is already over-strapped with very, very long processing times,” Ms. Pierce said of U.S.C.I.S.
Last week, the agency also said it would consider “country-specific factors” included in the travel ban as “significant negative factors” when evaluating applications for green cards and other benefits. The policy change, which could make it harder for immigrants from those countries to receive approvals, had been under consideration before the shooting of the National Guard members.
Migrants who qualify for work permits
The Trump administration said on Thursday that it would reduce the amount of time work permits are valid for refugees, asylum seekers and people granted asylum, among other migrants. Federal officials will now require them to renew their work permits every 18 months instead of every five years.
The Biden administration previously extended the maximum period to five years, up from two years, in an effort to reduce burdens on the agency that processes applications for employment authorization.
Afghans seeking visas
Some of the changes have targeted Afghans. Hours after the shooting, U.S.C.I.S. said it would halt the processing of immigration applications for them. The State Department then announced that it would halt visas for people from Afghanistan.
Afghans were already subject to the president’s travel ban, but there was an exception for Afghans eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa program, which covers those who helped the U.S. government during the war in their country.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
Madeleine Ngo covers immigration and economic policy for The Times.
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