On Friday, May 22, 2026, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a sweeping rule change requiring most green card applicants currently inside the United States to leave the country and apply from their home countries instead. The rule reverses decades of “adjustment of status” practice that allowed people already lawfully present in the U.S. to obtain permanent residency without leaving.
The scale of the change is large. Of the 783,000 people who received a green card from within the U.S. between October 2023 and September 2024, 53% were the spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens and green card holders, 28% were adjustments from refugee or asylee status, and 15% obtained their green card through employment. All of those categories are now affected. USCIS said the rule includes exemptions for “extraordinary circumstances” but did not specify what qualifies.
Immigration analysts and attorneys describe the rule as creating a deliberate Catch-22: many of the home countries to which applicants would now be forced to return are not currently processing immigrant visas at U.S. consulates, or are doing so with multi-year backlogs. “If families are told that the non-citizen family member must return to his or her country of origin to process their immigrant visa, but immigrant visas are not being processed there, it's a Catch-22,” attorneys told CNN. The practical effect is indefinite family separation — for U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents whose spouses, children, or parents now must leave the country to keep an open application.