USCIS Ends Routine Green Card Adjustment of Status — Forcing ~500,000 Applicants Per Year to Leave US

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on May 23, 2026 published a sweeping policy memo directing officers to treat 'adjustment of status' (AOS) as an 'extraordinary form of administrative grace' available only in exceptional circumstances — effectively eliminating the standard process by which immigrants already in the US can apply for a green card without leaving the country. The memo instructs USCIS officers to deny or heavily scrutinize I-485 domestic green card applications and instead require applicants to leave the US and apply through a US consulate abroad ('consular processing'). The policy affects approximately 500,000 people per year who currently use adjustment of status, including H-1B tech workers, doctors, F-1 students, religious workers, and humanitarian parolees — many of whom may have no safe country to return to or no functioning US embassy in their home country. AILA senior director Shev Dalal-Dheini called the memo an attempt to 'upend decades of processing of adjustment of status.' Legal experts anticipated near-certain court challenges citing: (1) Administrative Procedure Act violations from bypassing notice-and-comment rulemaking; (2) due process concerns for retroactive application to already-pending I-485 applications; and (3) statutory interpretation arguing the memo misreads the INA, which explicitly authorizes AOS. The policy is the most sweeping legal immigration restriction of Trump's second term, reaching a population of workers and students who entered the US legally — a significant expansion of the immigration crackdown beyond undocumented immigrants.