The Trump administration is planning a policy change that could make it harder for immigrants to get green cards and other approvals if they are from countries subject to the president’s travel ban, according to internal documents from the Department of Homeland Security.
As part of the expected change, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would consider what it called “country-specific factors” included in President Trump’s travel ban as “significant negative factors” when reviewing applications for many immigration requests, with certain exceptions, according to draft documents reviewed by The New York Times. The policy is still being finalized.
The policy change is a major expansion of the administration’s push to crack down on immigration from countries that it says lack sufficient screening and vetting for official documents. The shift would make it more challenging for those who arrived in the country before the travel ban to remain.
The change is also the latest effort by the Trump administration to narrow paths for legal immigration. Last month, the administration cut the number of refugees it would admit to the United States this fiscal year, rejecting thousands of people fleeing war and persecution while reserving slots for mostly white Afrikaner South Africans.
The policy change comes after Mr. Trump in June signed a travel ban on 12 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East. The ban bars travel to the United States by citizens of Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The ban also imposed partial restrictions on citizens from seven other countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Citizens of those countries cannot enter the United States permanently or receive certain visas.
Mr. Trump said in June that the ban was necessary because a recent domestic terrorist attack “underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted.” He added that people from certain countries were at greater risk of overstaying their visas.
The administration gave some exceptions to the travel ban. People with existing visas would be exempt, as would green card holders, athletes traveling to the United States for the 2026 World Cup or the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and Afghans eligible for the Special Immigrant Visa program, which is for those who helped the U.S. government during the war in Afghanistan.
A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the agency would not comment on draft internal guidance.
In the draft documents, the agency said some countries might not share enough vetting and screening information. Some countries also do not have adequate authorities for issuing passports and other documents, which affected the agency’s ability to decide whether an immigrant from that country qualified for a benefit, according to the documents.
The change would apply to certain applications for green cards, asylum, parole and other statuses that require a “discretionary analysis,” a review that involves an immigration officer assessing the positive and negative factors of a person’s application before approving it. The change would not apply to applications for citizenship.
Some immigration policy experts said it was unclear exactly how the policy would be carried out, but they were alarmed that certain applications for immigration benefits could be adversely affected because of a person’s country of origin.
“Having something that applies to you based on your country is absurd,” said Doug Rand, a senior official at Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration. “This is a radical change.”
Mr. Rand emphasized that the change would apply to people who had already been screened for national security risks and had legal authorization to live in the United States.
“Now they’re trying to reach inside the United States and overturn the settled expectations of people who have already been here,” he said. “This is an escalation of the Trump administration’s attack on legal immigration.”
Citizenship and Immigration Services has also expanded social media vetting and checks for “anti-American activity” for certain applicants for immigration benefits, including those seeking green cards. The agency said on Thursday that it had completed 12,502 individual social media checks in the 2025 fiscal year.
Michael Valverde, who was a senior official at Citizenship and Immigration Services for more than two decades, said the agency had long had to deal with applications based on documents that were harder to validate because they were issued by countries that lacked robust security practices. But perceiving difficult-to-corroborate documents as a negative factor in applications was new, he said.
“It will be telling if people actually are able to overcome the negative or if this is a de facto ban for people from the listed locations,” Mr. Valverde said.
Some experts said the effort would most likely increase denials of applications for benefits, although they expected it to be met with legal challenges. In the draft, Citizenship and Immigration Services said officials did not know how the policy change would affect denial rates.
Sarah Pierce, a former policy analyst at Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden and Trump administrations, said she thought that there was “no way that this policy wouldn’t increase denials” and that it would “endanger the idea of a fair and impartial review of those immigration cases.”
Ms. Pierce, who is the director of social policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank, said: “It’s fair and legitimate for the government to consider the validity of an applicant’s security check, whether or not there is sufficient information to determine that this individual is not a safety risk to the United States, and whether or not they trust that information. But the thing that’s illegitimate about this policy is that they’re predetermining that because someone is from a certain country.”
Ms. Pierce said she expected the policy to be legally challenged by people who could argue it was discriminating against them based on their nationality. She also said that Mr. Trump’s ability to impose travel bans relied on his authority to restrict the entry of foreign citizens to the United States.
“Something that makes this more legally vulnerable,” Ms. Pierce said, “is the fact that it applies to individuals who are inside the United States.”
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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