USCIS tells visa holders seeking green cards to apply abroad

Foreign nationals living legally in the United States on temporary visas were told they must leave the country and finish their green-card cases through consular processing abroad, unless they can show extraordinary circumstances. The shift means people who had planned to adjust status from inside the United States may now have to travel home, line up an interview at a U.S. consulate, and wait overseas while their permanent residency case moves forward.

The policy could reach a huge number of households and employers. In a typical year, about 1 million people apply for green cards, and roughly half of those cases are filed from inside the United States. For families that have already rented apartments, enrolled children in school, or built careers around a visa-holder’s presence, the change risks turning a routine immigration step into a separation that could stretch long enough to disrupt work, caregiving and school schedules.

Immigration and aid groups moved quickly to criticize the decision. World Relief called the policy “cruel” and “anti-family.” HIAS warned that it could force trafficking survivors and abused or neglected children to leave the United States just to complete residency paperwork, a reminder that procedural changes often fall hardest on people with the least margin for error.

USCIS defended the move as a return to the law’s original intent. Agency spokesperson Zach Kahler said the policy was meant to make the system “fairer and more efficient” and free up USCIS resources for other priorities. The agency also said sending more applicants abroad would reduce the need to track down and remove people who overstay after a denial, and let officers focus on other cases, including victims of violent crime and human trafficking, naturalization applications and security vetting.

The change lands at odds with USCIS’s own public guidance. The agency’s adjustment-of-status page says that process is used to apply for lawful permanent resident status while a person is present in the United States, without returning home, while its consular-processing guidance says applicants outside the country go through U.S. Department of State consulates abroad. Those pages were last reviewed on April 23, 2026, and July 20, 2023, respectively. The new memo appears to narrow the practical use of the in-country path by treating adjustment of status as an extraordinary form of relief, not the default route, and it comes as separate May 2026 filing-chart guidance also changed timing rules for some employment-based applicants. The result is not a new law, but a harder road to permanent residency for many people already building lives in the United States.