Trump administration pauses immigrant visa applications
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The Trump administration has paused immigrant visa applications worldwide to accommodate “in-depth training” for consular officers as it seeks to screen out individuals deemed likely to need US assistance.
Immigrant visa applicants with scheduled interviews at US embassies and consulates have received emails telling them their appointments were being rescheduled and that they would receive future notice of a new date and time.
“A more prosperous America means ensuring that visa applicants are not likely to become a public charge, as defined under US law and regulation, and not likely to become dependent on US public benefits reserved for qualified Americans in need,” a state department spokesperson told the FT.
The department this month launched “a global training initiative” to “ensure all consular officers are fully equipped to evaluate every visa applicant comprehensively and consistently”, the spokesperson added.
The pause is the latest move by an administration that has repeatedly sought to tighten entry to the US. President Donald Trump has made a crackdown on undocumented immigrants a centrepiece of his presidency while imposing new limits on visas and green cards and ending nearly all refugee resettlement.
The immigrant visa pause comes after a federal judge last week struck down Trump’s ban on applications from immigrants from 75 mostly poorer countries whom the administration thinks could need assistance.
Brian Simmons, an attorney at immigration law firm Fragomen in Washington, said many of the affected applicants had “already spent thousands of dollars and disrupted their lives to attend scheduled interviews, only to have their appointments cancelled at the last minute”.
The state department did not say when the appointments would resume. “To accommodate this in-depth training, appointments for visa services will be adjusted,” the spokesperson said.
Trump has faced a stream of legal challenges to his immigration policies. Federal courts rolled back an effort early in his first presidential term to bar entry to the nationals of seven majority Muslim countries. The Supreme Court later allowed a scaled-back version of his policy to take effect.
US District Judge Jeannette Vargas ruled on Friday that Trump’s pause on immigration applications from 75 countries — announced by the state department in January — overrode the “discretion and decision-making” over visas assigned to consular offices by Congress.
Vargas struck down Trump’s policy and any visa refusals based on it, giving both sides until September 11 to propose a path forward for resolving what remains of the case.
Since last year, the Trump administration has required those seeking immigrant visas to process their applications in their country of citizenship, even though many live and work legally in the US and some are married to Americans or have American children.
People from Mumbai to Naples vented their frustration about the latest disruption to their immigration applications on internet message boards.
“It bothers me that people travel out of the country to get this done and they cancel their appointment,” wrote one person on Reddit.
Another warned that “the exact same thing happened to a bunch of H1B visa interviews about 8 months back in India”, adding that some were still “stuck abroad” and “lost their jobs”.
Additional reporting by Laura Dubois and Andy Bounds in Brussels
