Under the second Trump administration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has repeatedly paused the processing of applications for a range of immigration benefits — including applications for lawful permanent residence, commonly known as adjustment of status, or getting your Green Card.

One of the earliest suspensions ran between March and April 2025 and primarily affected people with asylum or refugee status who were applying for their Green Cards. The administration said the pause was needed to conduct additional vetting. What that extra vetting involved was never clear, since these applicants had already been heavily vetted when their asylum or refugee status was originally approved.

To find out what actually happened, the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) filed a request for agency records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The records they obtained tell the story below.

According to the records, internal discussions about holding Green Card applications were already underway by March 7, 2025. At that point, the Refugee Operations unit of USCIS was reviewing Green Card applicants who held refugee status and were nationals of Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Emails surfaced through the FOIA indicate the re-review was tied to suspected gang affiliations among certain applicants.

On March 25, 2025, media reports confirmed that USCIS had suspended processing of Green Card applications filed by people with asylum and refugee status. The agency did not inform the public or explain how the suspension would work.

The FOIA documents show the pause actually began on March 21 and lasted about two weeks. A March 21 email directed USCIS district and field offices to place a hold on “all” Green Card adjudications, while a separate memo from the Field Operations Directorate clarified that the re-reviews were focused on refugee applicants from the five countries named above.

Agency records show there were 115,454 Green Card applications filed by asylees and refugees pending with USCIS as of March 26, 2025 — all of whom could have been swept up by the suspension. In practice, a spreadsheet circulated internally showed the actual hold was much narrower, covering over 18,000 applications.

The data also showed the hold reached beyond the original five countries. Affected applicants came from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. While most were from the originally designated countries, roughly 17% were from other nations. The largest single group of affected applicants was from Venezuela, at about 26.2%.

Records show USCIS lifted the suspension for these applicants on April 10, 2025. As before, the agency did not notify the public that the pause was over.

Then, on April 14, despite lifting the broader hold, USCIS circulated a list of 467 individuals whose applications remained on hold due to “public safety concerns.” Officials tied those concerns to Executive Order 14157, which designated certain international cartels and gangs — including Tren de Aragua and MS-13 — as foreign terrorist organizations. Notably, these particular applications were filed by refugees rather than asylees, and the disclosed records do not show whether those holds were ever lifted.

In its final public statement on the matter in March 2025, USCIS justified the pause as additional vetting. By November 2025, agency officials issued a memo directing staff to use new worksheets to decide whether an adjustment of status applicant should be required to attend an interview.

Several of the criteria focus on possible ties to cartels or terrorist organizations. Based on the disclosed worksheets, an interview could be required if the record suggests that an applicant:

• may have contact with, or membership in, a terrorist organization or entity known to engage in terrorism, including designated transnational criminal organizations;
• may have entered the United States with assistance from such an organization; or
• may present a public safety concern, whether egregious or non-egregious.

For the people caught in it, the suspension created real uncertainty. Applicants and their attorneys were left in the dark about whether the hold applied to their cases, because USCIS shared no details with them or the public. For many, it added months to applications that had already been pending for years — on top of the extensive vetting they had already gone through to obtain asylum or refugee status in the first place.

Without the media coverage, the pause might have happened with no outside oversight at all. As the administration continues to pause other benefit categories and add new vetting measures, the details uncovered through this FOIA request help applicants, attorneys, and elected officials press for answers about whether these suspensions are actually necessary.

This article is based on reporting and FOIA records published by the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

American Immigration Council: The Trump Administration Stopped Processing Certain Green Card Applications. Our FOIA Found What Happened Next.

Sudden, unannounced processing pauses make an already stressful process even harder — especially when no one will tell you whether your case is affected. If your adjustment of status application has stalled, or you are concerned about how new vetting measures could touch your case, it helps to have someone monitoring the situation and protecting your interests.

At Keller Law Group, LLC, we help clients understand where their case stands, respond to USCIS requests, and plan their next steps with clarity.

Schedule a consultation today.
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