Trump Closes Major Loophole in Green Card Applications

The Trump administration has closed a major loophole that aliens have previously exploited to obtain green cards while they are already resident in the USA without the necessary approval.

Some people who apply for permanent residence status while they are in our country already have temporary licenses, such as work visas. But there are also quite a few illegal aliens who apply for citizenship while already living in the country, sometimes for years ahead of time. To prevent abuse of our immigration system, the government will now require applicants for the permanent resident green card to return to their countries of origin while doing so.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services made the announcement on Friday. “USCIS is applying long-standing law and prior court decisions to require certain aliens with temporary visas who decide they want to permanently reside in the U.S. to return to their home countries to apply for permanent visas through the @StateDept,” it wrote. “We're returning to the original intent of the law to ensure aliens navigate our nation’s immigration system properly.”

USCIS noted that if aliens must apply while outside the USA, they do not have the option of "slip[ping] into the shadows" to live here illegally should their application receive a denial.

Following the law allows the majority of these cases to be handled by the @StateDept at U.S. consular offices abroad, as was designed to be the intended process.

And it frees up limited USCIS resources to focus on processing other cases that fall under our purview, including…
— USCIS (@USCIS) May 22, 2026

This vital reform to our immigration system will make USCIS more efficient and the process better able to filter out undesirable and dangerous applicants.

Let me give you an example of why this is an excellent rule change. Mahmoud Khalil became the face of Columbia University's violent antisemitism following the Oct. 7 atrocities, to the point where the Trump administration revoked his green card. Khalil's pro-jihad activism was so extreme that he made other students afraid of going to class.

Here's another example. In April, an illegal alien received a conviction after voting — illicitly, of course — in U.S. federal elections for years. Jose Ceballos received a green card in 1990, but then a conviction for battery in 1995 made that green card no longer valid. Despite that, he continued to reside in the U.S. and even registered to vote multiple times in Kansas while claiming to be a citizen. Decades after his first conviction, in 2025, the Mexican national applied for U.S. citizenship and denied ever having claimed citizenship before. That's the felony on which U.S. authorities finally nailed him in 2026.

But note how Ceballos first obtained a green card, then committed a crime, then continued to live in America and even vote, and finally decided some 35 years into his residency to try to become a citizen. That's the sort of catastrophe that will hopefully occur much less often thanks to the new green card requirements.

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