Trump's New USCIS Policies: Prepare for These Major Changes Now!

With Trump returning to office for a second term, what new policies and procedures can we expect that will make it even harder for legal immigration inside the United States?

During his first term, changes at USCIS increased denials by 37% and slowed case processing by an average of 46%. So today we are going to take a look at these policies because there is a chance that every single one of them could make a comeback.

Policies to Slow Down Immigration

The first thing that you need to understand about Trump's immigration policies is that they are not designed to make it easier for you to immigrate to the U.S.

In his mind, immigrants are actually harming the country, so his goal is actually to make it more difficult to come here. If you do manage to make it into this country, his goal is to make sure that you fit his vision of America. He is going to create policies that are going to slow things down and to inspect you more carefully along the way.

For example, one of the policies that he put in place during his first term was something called continuous immigration vetting, a system designed to track immigrants from the day that they apply for immigration benefits until the day that they become U.S. citizens. This program used a computer system to continuously run information through secured databases at every stage of your immigration process and if the system flagged you as a potential security risk, your case would be pulled for review by an immigration officer.

DHS has not exactly shared what the system looked for, but they did share that something as simple as your nationality could trigger a flag. By the end of Trump's first term, the system had flagged 124,000 immigration cases for review, significantly slowing down the entire agency.

Another thing that USCIS did underneath Trump was to end the deference policy. This was a policy that told USCIS officers not to go back and review case details if the previous case had already been approved.

For example, if somebody in the U.S. was already here on an H-1B visa and they have successfully renewed the visa twice before, then it should be very easy for them to renew it a third time. But the Trump administration disagreed.

They put an end to this deference policy and required USCIS officers to review every single renewal and extension as though it were a brand new case. As a result, the number of RFVs and denials increased. This one change in policy was one of the biggest reasons for delays underneath the Trump administration in the first term.

Another policy that slowed down decisions was requiring interviews for every case. At first, this requirement for in-person interviews only applied to employment-based cases as well as refugee and asylum applications. But they had plans to expand in-person interviews to even more case types underneath Trump's first term.

As a result of all of these interviews, USCIS officers had less time to do other tasks, which meant longer processing times overall for everybody.

Policies to Increase Denials

The policies that we discussed were not just slowing down the process, but the next ones went a step further and put more people into removal proceedings.

In 2018, the Trump administration actually told officers to go ahead and just deny cases for missing simple documents. This meant that no requests for evidence were sent out or even notices of intent to deny, just simple denials. So if your application was not flawless, you did not get a chance to fix it. You had to start over and file again.

But it did not stop there.

The Trump administration also introduced an automatic NTA policy, which required USCIS officers to issue a notice to appear whenever an immigration application was denied. This meant that if you made some sort of mistake on your former I-485 and it got denied as a result, it could cause you to end up in removal proceedings.

Even if you had no criminal record, paid all of your taxes on time, and had a family here in the US, a simple error in your application could lead to deportation proceedings.

The next policy was designed to prevent people from coming into the US, and that was Trump's public charge rule. The public charge rule originally said that you could not get legal status in this country if you received more than half of your income from cash assistance programs. But Trump expanded this rule to include more government programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.

Instead of requiring just half of your income be from cash assistance, the new rules said that you were inadmissible if there was even a chance that you might need to receive these benefits. That meant that USCIS would look into the details of your personal life and finances and even prospective ability to earn income to decide if you were at risk of becoming a public charge.

For example, if your family income was below $31,000 for a family of four, that could prevent you from getting legal status, even if you never even used government benefits before.

Some other things that could get you labeled as being a public charge included if you had any sort of health problems. Being older than the working age, not having private health care, being unemployed, not being able to speak English well, or having a lower education level. The Trump administration needed a way to get all this information so they created a form called the Form I-944 called the Declaration of Self-Sufficiency. This was an 18-page form that asked for all kinds of sensitive personal information including a credit report.

It also requested information on:

• Your health history
• Your financial status
• Your personal assets
• Details on all of your family members
• Your education history
• Your employment history and other things.

It basically provided the Trump administration with anything that they could use in order to deny your application based upon the public charge rule, even if you were not actually at risk of becoming a public charge. Many people started calling this a wealth test because your financial situation often decided whether or not you would be allowed into the country or granted legal status.

Now, assuming that you made it through continuous vetting, you didn't have your case denied over a tiny mistake, you passed the in-person interview, and you didn't get labeled as a public charge, you could still have your case sabotaged by anyone who didn't like you. That's because the Trump administration created a USCIS tip form that allowed anyone to report anyone for fraud.

This could include an angry ex, a disgruntled boss, or a disgruntled employee, or even simply someone who did not like immigrants. The person providing this information did not even have to provide their name or contact information, they could simply report you anonymously. To make matters worse, the form did not define what fraud actually meant, making it easy for people to justify their actions and feel like they were doing the right thing by reporting them.

Now, I want to remind everyone that this is information based upon what Trump did during his first term and from public statements made by his administration. We don't know exactly what he will do again until he takes office.

But that said, Trump has made immigration the focus of his second term and has already announced some outrageous things like using the military for mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, and deporting US citizens along with their family members.

So I would not be surprised if his immigration policies are just as extreme the second time around. Speaking of extreme policies, we did not even cover all of them. During his first term, Trump made it a lot harder to becoming a US citizen, and he's likely to do that again this time around. This could mean higher filing fees, longer forms, longer processing times for the N-400, a more difficult citizenship test, and more.

I cover all of this in my other video along with tips to protect your case, so be sure to check it out. I'll include a link here. Click to watch it next, and I'll see you there.