The Trump administration is transforming the agency known for processing green cards and citizenship requests into one of its strongest anti-immigration policing arms.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, is one of the three branches of the Homeland Security Department that deals with migration.
Traditionally, its more than 20,000 employees have focused on the various ways people can lawfully immigrate and stay in the U.S. — be that applying for asylum, a green card, citizenship, work visa, or another legal pathway.
Since January, administration officials have taken an axe to that traditional mission by encouraging early retirements, shuttering collective bargaining agreements and drastically cutting back on programs that facilitate legal migration. New job postings lean into the rhetoric of hiring "homeland defenders" and tackling fraud.
During his Senate confirmation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow proclaimed that "at its core, USCIS must be an immigration enforcement agency."
The efforts come as President Trump seeks to curb illegal immigration but also reduce legal ways to get to the U.S. and stay here, especially for certain nationalities.
It's rocking the agency from the inside, crushing morale and prompting resignations, according to current and former agency employees.
With the recent changes, at least 1,300 people took the "Fork in the Road" resignation offer for federal employees, while others have left on their own. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection employees were not allowed to take the offer.)
And it's catching immigrants and their families, lawyers and advocates off guard.
"'Am I going to get arrested?' … That's a question, regardless of their past," said Eric Welsh, an immigration attorney in California who helps his clients apply for various USCIS programs.
"There really is a lot more fear and there is a lot more concern about, should we do it at all?," Welsh said, about people applying for legal status.
Rapid changes after deadly shooting
The changes have been rapid. In recent weeks, the White House said it would re-review all approved refugee claims under the Biden administration.
After an Afghan national was charged for shooting two National Guard members in late November, the administration also halted processing green card and citizenship applications from nationals of 19 countries, including Afghanistan, and ordered retroactive reviews of already-approved applications.
"I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover," Trump wrote on social media after the shooting. "Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation."
USCIS stopped processing many immigration applications entirely, including for asylum.
"USCIS' role in the nation's immigration system has never been more critical," Edlow, its director, said in a statement last week announcing a new vetting center that will conduct interviews and re-review already approved immigration applications.
"Under President Trump, we are building more protective measures that ensure fraud, deception, and threats do not breach the integrity of our immigration system."
Recent policies come after a swath of other changes this year. Policy memos have emphasized that the priority for refugees is admitting those who can easily assimilate into the country, with the target demographic being white Afrikaners from South Africa.
The White House also capped refugee admissions for this fiscal year at 7,500, the lowest since the modern refugee program started in the 1980s.
The agency has unveiled a longer, tougher citizenship test. It has also moved forward with a rule that would allow officers to consider an immigrant's legal use of public benefits, such as food stamps and healthcare, as a reason to deny status.
Reports of arrests and detention following routine USCIS interviews and appointments have increased fear among immigrants.
"They're reaching deeper into the weeds of immigration policy, and they may be more successful in slowing legal immigration, which at least some members of the Trump administration have stated is their goal," said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. "That's a pretty different stance towards immigration than we've seen over recent decades."
In Trump's first term, the changes did not significantly curb legal migration, but that may be changing.
"Some people, if they have a green card, might just wait to naturalize and see if they can wait for a new administration," Gelatt said.
USCIS leans into enforcement and policing tactics
The new administration has prioritized the agency's law enforcement work.
For example, USCIS has promoted a new role: "homeland defenders."
It is unclear exactly what these positions are responsible for. USCIS said they will be "interviewing aliens, reviewing applications, and identifying criminal or ineligible aliens."
The posting also specifies this position is expected to provide direct support to CBP and ICE, two agencies leading the effort to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.
The roles also seem to cater to those with backgrounds in traditional law enforcement, contrary to a background in immigration law and administrative government work that is more typical for USCIS.
USCIS said it received some 35,000 applications for the role of "homeland defender" and has made "hundreds" of job offers, including to former law enforcement officials and veterans, according to a November USCIS press release.
"USCIS is cutting bureaucratic red tape to hire fiercely dedicated, America-first patriots to serve on the frontlines and hold the line against terrorists, criminal aliens, and bad actors intent on infiltrating our nation," the release stated.
It also created USCIS special agents, who have law enforcement authority to carry firearms, and investigate, arrest and prosecute immigration cases. In the past, much of this would be the work of ICE or CBP, according to the release announcing the new workforce.
"Certainly the immigration enforcement side of things that are happening has sent a message that anybody who isn't a citizen in the United States could be arrested and put into ICE detention and potentially deported," Gelatt said. "That has a real chilling effect on people's willingness to interact with the government generally, and with USCIS as well."
USCIS workers defend past enforcement
The changes are having an impact inside the agency, as workers feel out of the loop about the direction and pace of changes.
Michael Knowles was an asylum officer for 34 years and currently serves as the executive vice president of the union that represents 15,000 USCIS employees. He says morale is some of the lowest he's seen in his tenure, thanks to the termination of the union contract, a haphazard back-to-office mandate that has employees working in makeshift desks, and a lack of communication from agency leadership.
"There are questions about what will be our mission, what will be our focus? And to that extent, we are alarmed by rhetoric," Knowles said. He said the agency has always enforced the nation's immigration laws when it processes applications.
One USCIS refugee officer who recently departed the agency after nearly a decade said the speed of the changes "overwhelmed" employees, and recent changes were the last straw. The person spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity out of concern of retaliation from the agency they hope to return to.
USCIS staffers say they have always worked hard to ensure people don't get benefits they do not qualify for, and also look for people who may be breaking the law.
So employees were upset by the administration's implication that they hadn't been doing their jobs properly for the last five years, after the White House announced all refugees admitted under in the Biden era must be reinterviewed.
"It's going to cause a lot of confusion. It's going to cause a lot of chaos. It's going to cost a lot of money," the employee said. "It seems impossible."
USCIS said it has paused the approvals while it "works to ensure that all aliens from these countries are vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible," the agency said in an emailed statement.
Not "an adversarial office"
Beyond policy and rhetoric changes, there's been subtler signs of transformation.
Signs inside USCIS offices urge people to leave the country, mirroring the tone of a detention center, rather than that of an immigration office, according to Welsh and other lawyers.
"USCIS is not designed to be an adversarial office," he said. "They're not the enforcers. They're not looking to reduce."
Now, he said, his clients are concerned with needing to have proof of a good moral character by providing church attendance or charitable donation history, for example.
"It's now certainly not the kind of friendly atmosphere that we used to experience with the agency," Welsh said.
Lawyers fear all the changes would further curb legal migration of the kind the U.S. had previously welcomed.
"We have borders and we have benefits. So for people who deserve them or people who have earned them for various reasons, we provide them," Welsh said. "If we just go into a pure enforcement mindset, then there's no happy place to be."
The agency did not respond to a question about whether immigrants will be deterred from pursuing legal pathways to permanent status.
"The safety of the American people always come [sic] first," the agency said in its statement.
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