The Trump administration announced last Friday that US visa holders who want a green card must first return to their home countries and apply from there, “except in extraordinary circumstances.”
On its face, this rule — which was officially promulgated in a memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — would upend America’s immigration system and the lives of hundreds of thousands of US residents.
For more than 50 years, through the “adjustment of status” process, visa holders in the United States have been able to remain in the country while applying for permanent residency. This was no small thing. For legal immigrants, the alternative to securing an adjustment of status is not taking a short sojourn abroad while Uncle Sam inspects their paperwork. Rather, due to various quirks of US immigration law, some immigrants must wait more than a decade for their green card applications to be approved.
President Donald Trump’s new rule therefore threatens to exile hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants — including physicians at understaffed rural hospitals, gifted technologists at Silicon Valley firms, the spouses of US citizens, and parents of American children.
Whether this will actually happen is unclear. Both the memo officially laying out the policy — and the administration’s messaging about it — contain ambiguities and apparent contradictions. For example, the administration has said that visa holders can only remain in the United States during the green card application process under “extraordinary circumstances” and that any visa holder who provides an “economic benefit” to America may still do so. Yet more or less all employed visa holders provide some economic benefit to the United States.
Regardless, the new memo represents a massive escalation in Trump’s crackdown on immigration. It also arguably marks the resolution of a years-long war for the soul of the MAGA movement.
Since Trump retook the presidency in 2024, his coalition’s hardline nativists and Silicon Valley patrons have been fighting over what an “America First” immigration policy actually entails.
America’s tech industry is heavily reliant on global talent. About one-fifth of our nation’s STEM workers in 2021 were foreign-born. For this reason among others, the tech right — a contingent of Silicon Valley luminaries who backed Trump in 2024 — advocate for a meritocratic brand of immigration restrictionism.
In their account, America needs to repel undocumented, low-skill migrants who threaten to burden its safety nets, warp its culture, and empower the Democratic Party. Yet the United States also needs to welcome highly talented, English-speaking, America-loving workers from around the globe in order to sustain its economic competitiveness and dynamism.
“I understand why we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals, mooch on welfare…and otherwise undermine the country,” Blake Scholl, the Trump-friendly CEO of Boom Supersonic, posted on X after the latest immigration news. “But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity.”
The nativist right isn’t so sure about that. In its view, whether immigrants engineer software in Silicon Valley — or deliver food in New York City — they are typically undermining native-born Americans’ interests, at least in their current numbers.
By deterring highly skilled, legal immigrants from seeking green cards, the Trump administration has made its allegiance to the second camp unambiguous.
While not entirely surprising, this development wasn’t always certain. Trump erected some obstacles to high-skill immigration during his first term. But these changes had been relatively modest. More critically, after a slew of tech titans lined up behind Trump’s candidacy in 2024, Trump signaled support for their immigration views.
During a June 2024 appearance on All-In, a podcast hosted by venture capitalists sympathetic to his campaign, Trump was asked whether he would “promise us you will give us more ability to import the best and brightest around the world to America”?
The candidate replied, “I do promise. But I happen to agree, otherwise I wouldn’t promise. … You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically — as part of your diploma — a green card to be able to stay in this country and that includes junior colleges too.”
Months later, in the wake of Trump’s victory, his Silicon Valley supporters got into an online feud with hardline nativists over H-1B visas — which give temporary legal status to highly educated immigrant workers employed by American companies. After some MAGA influencers called for restricting such visas (and high-skill immigration more broadly), the tech right rallied to the program’s defense.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Elon Musk posted on X in December 2024. “I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Once again, Trump appeared to side with Silicon Valley, telling reporters that he supported the H-1B program, since “We need competent people, we need smart people coming into our country…we need a lot of people coming in.”
Of course, much of the MAGA movement disagreed.
Although the nativist right has tended to dedicate most of its energy to combating undocumented immigration, it has also sought to repel highly skilled legal immigrants in general — and those who work for tech companies in particular.
In fact, two of the original architects of Trump’s immigration vision — Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — both long lamented the prevalence of foreign-born workers in Silicon Valley.
Notably, Trump himself did not share this view at the outset of his first presidential campaign. During a 2015 podcast appearance, Trump told Bannon that he worried about foreign-born Ivy League graduates being forced to return to their home countries instead of using their skills in the United States, since “we have to keep our talented people.”
Bannon replied, “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think…a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”
Likewise, during his time working for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, White House adviser Stephen Miller co-authored a “handbook” on immigration policy that decried “The Silicon Valley STEM Hoax” — namely, the idea that the United States needed to increase immigration in order to meet its demand for workers with tech skills. The document argued that increasing admissions of foreign-born STEM workers would “deny millions of Americans a shot at a good-paying middle-class job.”
From this perspective, highly skilled immigrants are scarcely more desirable than low-skill ones — and may even be less so. After all, few Americans are eager to perform seasonal agricultural labor. But many covet well-paid tech jobs. And if one believes that the supply of such positions is largely fixed, then every coding gig taken by an immigrant is one denied to a native-born American.
For many nativists, however, the problem with high-skill immigration isn’t purely economic. As Bannon’s comments suggest, the ethnic composition of Silicon Valley’s foreign-born labor-force is also a concern.
Following the Trump administration’s changes to green card policy last week, frank expressions of anti-Indian animus proliferated on right-wing social media. Previously, the far-right influencer — and periodic Trump confidante — Laura Loomer had suggested that “third-world invaders from India” threatened to overrun America, a country “built by white Europeans.”
Some Republican elected officials have played to such anti-Indian resentments. This week, US Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) referenced Indian immigrants’ disproportionate share of H-1B visas while advocating for legislation that would end the program entirely.
India’s government is upset about H-1B delays because their citizens are “stranded” back home?
— Congressman Greg Steube (@RepGregSteube) May 26, 2026
Meanwhile Americans have been stranded out of jobs for years while companies use H-1Bs to replace U.S. workers with foreign labor.
My EXILE Act would END the H-1B program entirely!… https://t.co/trS3UhpwAb
Before last week, the second Trump administration had already been leaning toward the nativist right’s position on skilled immigration by, among other things, heavily constraining the issuance of new H-1B visas.
But Trump’s ostensible transformation of the green card application process constitutes a far more definitive — and consequential — rebuke of the tech right’s vision for immigration.
Indeed, the policy explicitly aims to chase most international students from the United States as soon as they graduate, the very scenario that Trump had spent years lamenting.
Further, unlike previous restrictions to H-1B visas, the green card memo seeks to reduce the number of foreign-born permanent residents in the United States, rather than merely the number of guest workers. Populists on the right and left have long argued that guest workers are uniquely exploitable — since they need to keep their jobs in order to remain in the country legally — and thus put downward pressure on labor standards in their industries. Yet immigrants applying for green cards are often seeking to escape that very form of dependence and secure the same bargaining power as US citizens.
What’s more, the new rules would hit Silicon Valley’s disproportionately Asian workforce particularly hard. America’s annual green card issuance is capped by country. For this reason, immigrants from highly populous nations with large educated workforces — such as India and China — must wait many years before their green card applications are approved. An Indian tech worker who applies for a green card tomorrow is likely to wait more than 12 years before actually securing permanent residency. Under traditional procedures, that worker could remain legally in the United States while awaiting approval. Under Trump’s new system, they would need to go into exile for a decade.
It remains unclear how USCIS agents will interpret their new marching orders. Although the administration’s memo suggests that adjustment of status should be offered only in extraordinary circumstances, it nonetheless gives USCIS officers discretion to provide such relief as they see fit. And the document also suggests that some categories of immigrants may be partial “exceptions” to the rule.
“We are hearing USCIS examiners are now asking questions like, ‘Why are you applying for adjustment? Why couldn’t you have left and applied abroad?’” Cyrus Mehta, an immigration attorney in New York City, told me. “Different local offices will likely take different positions on how to deal with it. Some will be business as usual. Others may be instructed to get tough.”
It’s possible then that the tech right could persuade the administration to interpret its own memo narrowly — or else, convince a court to strike the policy down.
In any case, the administration’s position is likely to deter many highly skilled visa holders from seeking permanent residency. And it will also provide talented young people abroad with another reason to seek admission to other wealthy countries, instead of the US.
If interpreted literally, meanwhile, the new rules would do far greater harm to the American tech sector than any of the Biden-era antitrust policies or AI regulations that purportedly “red-pilled” so many Silicon Valley billionaires.
In short, red America’s civil war over immigration policy is essentially over. The nativists won, the tech right lost; the latter’s best hope is merely to negotiate favorable terms of surrender.
This comic is by me and Becky Hawkins.
Becky writes:
What’s a better challenge than drawing a period piece? Drawing a period piece where the reader is supposed to think it’s present-day until panel 4! Luckily for me, men’s fashion doesn’t change as wildly as women’s fashion, and that one haircut (long on top, short on the sides) is still around. The guy on the left–suit, glasses, and hair–was modeled after someone I saw while I was out and about. Granted, sartorial choices in Portland don’t seem to be bound by time or geography… I hope it works!
Surprising no-one, I spent most of my time laying out panel 4. Barry’s script says: The camera pulls back a little. We now see that the speaker is wearing a swastika armband just above his left elbow. Maybe we can see one or two characters in the background wearing them too. Women are wearing circa 1930s hats; there’s a horse and carriage in the background, maybe; in general, we can now see we’re looking at Berlin in the 1930s.
I did a few sketches from different angles. When I pictured this cartoon in my head, the “camera” was pointing toward the cafe, with the characters sitting by the wall. That way, all you could see in panels 1-3 were two guys, a big window, and a bit of wall. It would be easier to hide the 1930s-ness that way. But when I sketched it out, I couldn’t make it work.
Barry kindly collected several photos of 1930s Berlin cafes before sending me the script. But I still spent way too much time looking at old photos to find some buildings that would plausibly be on a modern American street. Berlin’s public plazas, broad streets with tree-lined medians, and ornate building facades would scream Ye Olde World, in my opinion.
I searched for “1930s Berlin street photography” and found some commercial-residential buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in an old-for-the-US downtown area. I then committed the newbie cartoonist mistake of putting a lot of detail into an area that was destined to sit behind a word balloon. At least I copy-pasted the windows.
I hope you enjoyed this cartoon!
Barry writes:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., ignited the latest semantic scuffle when she recently charged that the Trump administration “has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.” Her use of this term to describe the mass detention facilities in which thousands of asylum-seeking migrants, many of them children forcibly separated from parents and family members, are being held in deplorable conditions, provoked an immediate and fierce backlash. … Sami Steigmann, a Holocaust survivor voiced his indignation: “What you are doing is insulting every victim of the Holocaust. Shame on you!” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, charged that Ocasio-Cortez “is insulting victims of genocide” with her comments.
But concentration camps – both actual camps, and the term – existed before World War Two. As far back as 1899, during the Boer War, some British people argued against calling the British concentration camps in Africa what they were.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: “A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”
People tend to conflate “concentration camps” with “death camps,” but the two terms aren’t interchangeable, and it’s important to be able to discuss concentration camps without euphemisms. Refusing to call them what they are just helps them get worse.
If you were swept off the streets in vans by secret police wearing masks; if your initiation into detention involved transit camps meant to hide your departure and effectively disappear you from legal help, temporarily or forever; if you are held with others who are denied due process; and if you are detained with people who have predominantly been rounded up more on the basis of ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation than for any criminal charge you have in common, you are in a concentration camp. It is only a question of what stage concentration camp you are in, and whether you will be stuck there until the camp is allowed to transform into its next nightmare form.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. All of them show two men in suit and tie, talking at an outdoor cafe. One man is a redhead with a mustache; the other is a clean-shaven blonde.
PANEL 1
REDHEAD: And the conditions in the concentration camps we’ve built are appalling! I’m ashamed for my country!
BLONDE: Whoa! “Concentration camps”? Really?
PANEL 2
A shot of the blonde man, lecturing.
BLONDE: The camps can be criticized but calling them “concentration camps” is inflammatory. It’s something people say for the shock value.
PANEL 3
The blonde man looks angry.
BLONDE: Frankly, calling them “concentration camps” demeans the memory of the victims of the real historic concentration camps!
PANEL 4
The “camera” pulls back, and we see that this is a scene from 1930s Germany. (Storefront signs are in German, there’s a horse and carriage going past, women in 1930s fashions and hats.) The blonde man has angrily stood up, and we can see he wears a swastika on his sleeve (as does another man in the foreground).
BLONDE: And finally – never say you’re ashamed to be German. It’s like our new chancellor Hitler says – we’re making Germany great again!
(No chicken fat in this one!)
Buenos Aires, Argentina – The Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments on Wednesday regarding the Trump administration’s attempts to end Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which defends Haitian migrants from deportations.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, which is likely to be made in the coming months, could affect around 350,000 Haitians who are currently living in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security, then headed by Kristi Noem, justified February’s decision saying that Noem “determined that there are no extraordinary or temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals […] from returning to safety,” and that “it is contrary to the national interests of the United States to permit Haitian nationals […] to remain.”
Immigrant rights advocates, however, paint a different picture.
Daniel Berlin, policy director for protection pathways at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), told Latin America Reports that “Haiti continues to face a compounding crisis marked by food insecurity, displacement, deadly disease outbreaks, and surging gang violence, making it dangerous for anyone forced to return.”
“There are groups of people at particularly high risk, notably women and children as gangs increasingly use sexual violence to strike fear in communities and forced child recruitment has risen 200%,” he added.
Haitians were first granted TPS in 2010 following a devastating earthquake and have seen their protections extended multiple times since, including after the assassination of Jovenel Moise, the Caribbean country’s last elected president.
Since Moise’s assassination in 2021, Haiti has suffered from institutional collapse and rife gang violence.
More than 8,100 killings were documented nationwide between January and November last year, whilst up to half of the members making up these deadly armed groups are children, according to the UN.
As a result, the IRC reports that 73% of households feel unsafe where they sleep and 60% of households do not have their children in school due to fears of kidnapping, recruitment, and crossfire.
Berlin warns that “if TPS is ended, the administration could begin the legal process to remove people without other status immediately.”
The reality on the ground has led the plaintiffs to argue that the Trump administration did not follow due process in evaluating the conditions in Haiti.
The New York Times reported earlier this week that government officials had distorted evidence in order to justify removing Haitians’ TPS. Internal emails show that data that did not support the administration’s argument was removed from research reports.
Moreover, the lawyers also referenced President Trump’s frequent usage of inflammatory language against Haitian people to contend that the administration was racially motivated in its decision, which would violate the constitutional prohibitions of discriminatory government actions.
Trump has previously described Haitian immigrants as undesirable because they come from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country and claimed that they had been eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Lower court judges who dealt with the case found that Noem’s decisions were in fact predetermined and not informed by meaningful analysis, thus postponing the terminations of Haitians’ TPS.
The government’s lawyers asked the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to intervene as a result, arguing that the courts have no right to review Noem’s decisionmaking.
In the same session, the Supreme Court also heard arguments regarding the TPS of 6,100 Syrians in the US.
Featured image description: Protest at the US Capitol against the removal of Haitian migrants’ Temporary Protected Status, March 6th 2026.
Featured image credit: @MarioNawfal via X.
The post US Supreme Court weighs ending Haitian migrants’ protected status appeared first on Latin America Reports.
A Guardian analysis reveals how most of 39 countries facing US entry restrictions are most vulnerable environmentally
Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is largely targeting people from the countries most vulnerable to displacement from climate-driven disasters, a Guardian analysis shows.
As the Trump administration pushes policies to boost planet-heating fossil fuels, millions of people are being forced to flee their homelands due to storms, floods and droughts worsened by the climate crisis.
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© Composite: The Guardian, AFP via Getty Images
© Composite: The Guardian, AFP via Getty Images
© Composite: The Guardian, AFP via Getty Images
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