Immigration Restrictions Mount Against Americans And Legal Residents

Americans and lawful permanent residents who want close family members and others to join them in the United States face mounting legal immigration restrictions. While the Trump administration characterizes the travel ban as against specific nations, the measure prohibits previously lawful actions by Americans and lawful permanent residents. Analysts say the travel ban uses data in less than legitimate ways, including citing overstay rates for temporary visas to justify barring people from obtaining a green card, also known as permanent residence, a status that people cannot overstay.

Immigration Restrictions Imposed Against Americans And Lawful Permanent Residents Sponsoring Close Relatives

On June 4, 2025, Donald Trump issued a proclamation banning the entry of persons issued immigrant visas at a consulate (but who are not yet lawful permanent residents) and the entry of persons with temporary visas from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The proclamation also bans the entry of persons issued immigrant visas and limits the entry ban on temporary (nonimmigrant) visas to tourists and business travelers and students and exchange visitors for an additional seven countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. On June 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio further suspended the issuance of visas to people in the targeted countries and categories.

The Trump administration crafted the new proclamation to overcome legal challenges and negative news stories. The travel ban issued in September 2017, which went into effect after Supreme Court approval, included blocking the Immediate Relatives of U.S. citizens from the affected countries and generated a slew of news stories about Americans separated from spouses. Immediate Relatives are the spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens.

After the 2017 travel ban, admissions for the Immediate Relatives of U.S. citizens dropped significantly from the affected countries. A waiver in the proclamation helped little. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis shows between FY 2016 and FY 2019, the annual admission of the Immediate Relatives of U.S. citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen declined by 67%.

The new proclamation includes an exception for the spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens. However, U.S. citizens must overcome a new standard: “clear and convincing evidence of identity and family relationship (e.g., DNA),” according to the proclamation.

“This standard is higher than the preponderance of evidence standard that exists presently for U.S. citizens to claim their relationship to relatives they wish to sponsor for permanent residence,” said immigration attorney Cyrus Mehta. “Normally, the standard only escalates to the clear and convincing standard in situations involving suspected fraud, such as when a respondent in removal proceedings marries a U.S. citizen or when there have been instances of prior fraud.”

Under the proclamation, the federal government prohibits U.S. citizens from sponsoring an adult child (married or unmarried) or a sibling from the listed countries. That represents a significant immigration restriction against American citizens.

The proclamation also bars lawful permanent residents from sponsoring a spouse, minor child or unmarried adult child from the 19 countries.

“There seems to be a strategy to prevent immigration and future citizenship from these mainly African countries,” said Mehta. He considers the ban on lawful permanent residents sponsoring their spouses or children “draconian.”

New developments may support Mehta’s view that the Trump administration is motivated by a desire to ban many Africans from coming to the United States. The Washington Post reports the administration may add 36 more countries to the travel ban, including 25 African countries. That would mean, with limited exceptions, nationals from 35 of the 54 countries in Africa could be banned from immigrating, visiting or studying in the United States.

“While it may be difficult to challenge the entire proclamation on its face as unconstitutional under equal protection or First Amendment principles after Trump v. Hawaii, plaintiffs may try to take shots at challenging narrower provisions such as the provision rendering it harder for U.S. citizens to sponsor immediate relatives from the banned country,” said Mehta.

Targets Of Trump Campaign Rhetoric Are Banned From Immigration And Temporary Visas

During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Donald Trump vilified three nationalities: Haitians, Venezuelans and “people from the Congo,” making statements journalists found untrue about each nationality. Trump accused Venezuelan gangs of “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.” He claimed Haitians were eating their neighbor’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Trump also asserted that the government of “the Congo” had opened its jails and sent prisoners to the United States to commit crimes.

Under the travel ban proclamation, Venezuelans, Haitians and individuals from the Republic of the Congo are, with limited exceptions, banned from obtaining immigrant and temporary visas.

The proclamation criticizes Haiti, Venezuela and Afghanistan for lacking a reliable or functioning government. However, the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for the three countries and claimed it was safe for Haitians, Venezuelans and Afghans to return, citing improved conditions in each nation.

The inconsistencies in the proclamation indicate Trump officials worked backward by first identifying nationalities they wished to block from the United States and then seeking a rationale to list them in the travel ban.

Immigration Proclamation ‘Catastrophic’ For Cuban Americans And Haitian Americans

The travel ban will harm immigrant communities in Florida and elsewhere. “The travel ban is catastrophic for many U.S. citizens from Haiti and Cuba, as well permanent residents from those countries,” said attorney Ira Kurzban, chair of the immigration department at KKWT in Miami. “It doesn’t allow people to reunify with family members, and it forces people to remain in or be deported to conditions that the United States and the rest of the world have recognized as absolutely horrific.”

Kurzban points out that the Trump administration’s policy permits the government to deport Cubans and Haitians to Rwanda, Libya, El Salvador or other places to which they have no connection and where they might be imprisoned if they can’t be returned to Cuba or Haiti. “Instead of being deported, many of these people could be doctors or nurses in the United States,” he said.

The travel ban harms U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents sponsoring family members in several ways. First, the Trump administration bars U.S. citizens from the 19 countries from gaining approval for new applications to sponsor their siblings or adult children, even though immigration law permits it, and prohibits lawful permanent residents from sponsoring a spouse or child. That forces a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident to leave the United States if they wish to be with their family.

Second, the ban stops people who may have waited 10 or 15 years to immigrate legally from arriving in the United States while the travel ban remains in place. Third, Kurzban notes that the State Department has barred issuing immigrant visas, meaning initial filings and paperwork will not take place to sponsor family members.

The State Department could have allowed processing to continue while the ban on entering the United States remained in effect. “The entry ban is supposed to be temporary, but that’s just a mirage, because not issuing the visas and ending the visa process means starting that backup will take substantial time,” said Kurzban. “The decision to not only ban entry, but to ban the whole process of getting the visa, having it put in your passport, or if you’re an immigrant, going through the whole immigrant processing, is now, in effect, shut down.”

Under the proclamation, the federal government also will prohibit family members from traveling to the United States for a visit, wedding or funeral.

Immigration Proclamation Uses DHS Overstay Report To Ban People Who Can’t Overstay Visas

In the travel ban proclamation, the Trump administration cites overstay rates for temporary visas in countries to prohibit people from immigrating and staying permanently. It is impossible to overstay an immigrant visa since people are allowed to remain in the United States permanently on such visas. Analysts point out the U.S. government has banned one set of individuals for actions taken by a different group of people that bear no relationship to joining a spouse or other close family member to live in America. The travel ban also bars employers from sponsoring people outside the country for permanent residence from the 19 nations.

The proclamation uses statements such as, “According to the Overstay Report, Turkmenistan had a B-1/B-2 visa overstay rate of 15.35 percent and an F, M, and J visa overstay rate of 21.74 percent. (ii) The entry into the United States of nationals of Turkmenistan as immigrants . . . is hereby suspended.” (Emphasis added.) Similar statements are used for most of the countries listed in the proclamation.

The overstay rates in the DHS reports are suspect since the documents include many unrecorded departures that may not be actual overstays. DHS has problems with its systems correctly identifying individuals who changed status inside the U.S. or left the country, which renders its reports inappropriate for policy purposes. That is particularly the case with students.

The “suspected in-country overstay” rate for student and exchange visitors in FY 2018 dropped by 60% over a year, from 2.11% to 0.84% 12 months later, according to DHS, as the agency’s systems caught up. People from countries experiencing violence may not have overstayed their visas but applied for asylum, received Temporary Protected Status or remained in the country via other lawful means, such as marriage. DHS systems may record and treat them as overstays.

Experts note the State Department can address overstays by denying visas to individuals they think will overstay a visa, a far less draconian approach than banning everyone in that country from entering the United States.

The most recent DHS overstay report lists Iran and Venezuela as having low overstay rates for F-1 student and exchange visitor visas. Nonetheless, the proclamation bans nationals from the two countries from obtaining student visas.

The travel bans and the refugee suspension prevent U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents from sponsoring or reuniting with close family members. U.S. employers are also mainly prohibited from hiring individuals from the 19 countries. Immigration measures against those outside the United States often translate into restrictions on U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. Ira Kurzban said, “I think most Americans fail to realize that when you harm immigrants, you are hurting their American citizen or lawful permanent resident families.”