ICE arrests and deportations often get most of the attention. But another side to the Trump administration’s crackdown is largely flying under the radar.
“They’ve slashed legal immigration for families. They’ve slashed legal immigration for employers. … There’s basically no category you can find that they haven’t targeted for reductions and cuts,” says David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute, who argues this is a “radical change” – and an underreported story.
In what officials have billed as the largest mass deportation campaign in history, federal agents deployed in cities across the country became a familiar — and controversial — sight over the past year, with immigration authorities’ aggressive arrest tactics fueling fierce debate in Washington about agency funding.
And actions by ICE have made frequent headlines since Trump returned to power, most recently this week with the news that a new acting director will soon assume the agency’s top job.
But Bier says there’s another story about immigration in the US that’s harder to tell, but no less significant.
“You don’t see the backstory of all that’s leading up to that guy being handcuffed,” he says. Still, Bier says the way the administration handles legal immigration is “intimately connected to the chaos in the streets.”
Here are several key shifts in the legal immigration landscape that Bier and other experts are tracking.
Even as President Donald Trump frequently touts his successes reducing illegal immigration at the US-Mexico border, Bier argues the administration has done even more to block legal immigration.
“The cuts to legal immigration in 2026 are now twice as great on a monthly basis than the cuts to illegal immigration at the border,” Bier says.
To reach that conclusion, Bier compared data on Border Patrol arrests with data on the number of immigrant, student and skilled worker visas issued, the number of refugees admitted into the country and the number of asylum seekers allowed to enter legally at ports of entry.
Bier isn’t the only expert making this point. A recent analysis from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute described changes to the US legal immigration system as “drastic.”
Julia Gelatt calls the administration’s efforts to slow legal immigration “unprecedented.”
“The actions by the Trump administration on legal immigration have the potential to cut the level of legal immigration to the U.S. in half this year,” says Gelatt, associate director of the US immigration policy program at MPI. “It’s a huge cut to our immigration system and has enormous implications for American citizens and U.S. employers.”
Those actions include:
US Citizenship and Immigration Services maintains the administration has good reasons for changing its approach.
“Open-border organizations are upset that legal immigration is no longer a rubber stamp. That’s exactly the point,” a USCIS spokesperson said in an email. “Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, our immigration system is being reformed to serve American citizens, American workers, American families, and preserve our national identity, not rapidly import foreigners who take American jobs, commit crimes, burden our welfare system, and erode our cultural and social fabric.”
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Legal immigrants living in the US also face new hurdles.
Officials from USCIS say they’ve taken steps to bolster vetting, including indefinitely pausing decisions for applicants from 39 countries deemed “high-risk.” The move impacts legal immigrants seeking visas, work permits, green cards and citizenship – though officials have carved out some groups from the restrictions, and recently said they plan to exempt certain physicians whose applications were held up by the freeze.
Processing delays are leaving many applicants for legal immigration benefits in limbo — and potentially vulnerable to arrest if they don’t have the proper paperwork approved, according to Bier and Gelatt.
“The backlogs…that are building up at USCIS mean that a lot of people are falling out of work authorization, falling out of DACA protections, unable to keep their visa status and stay legally in the United States,” Gelatt says.
Signs of major shifts in legal immigration started emerging last year. But a lag in data reporting means we don’t have the full picture of the current landscape. As of January, the monthly number of green card approvals had fallen about 50% over the course of a year, according to Bier’s analysis.
And data shows that Cubans in particular have been hit hard by the administration’s approach, Bier says, with green card processing plunging to just 15 approvals in the most recent month when data was available, and immigration arrests skyrocketing around 400% in a year.
“You’re saying, ‘We need to crack down on illegal immigration because people should do it the right way,’ and then you’re taking away that right way from people,” Bier says.
Immigrant rights advocates have accused the administration of using isolated incidents as a pretext to punish many who are following the rules. But USCIS has said its increased vetting is necessary to root out fraud and crime.
“We are cleaning up the reckless policies of the prior administration that allowed criminals and fraudsters to exploit our legal immigration system. Officers are no longer being pressured to look the other way. Every application now gets the scrutiny Americans deserve,” the USCIS spokesperson said. “We welcome those who come to assimilate, contribute, and love this country, but we will no longer sacrifice American security, prosperity, or identity on the altar of globalism.”
Many of the administration’s efforts to reshape the legal immigration landscape are facing court challenges.
And at least one group recently scored a victory. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled last month that the USCIS can’t enforce its pause on processing applications for 22 plaintiffs who filed declarations about lost jobs, mental health struggles, financial hardships and other harms they suffered due to the policy. The administration is also turning to the courts as it aims to ramp up denaturalizations, the legal process for revoking US citizenship.
“I’m not sure why this is even controversial,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told CBS News last week.
“Unfortunately — and I think you’re going to hear more about this in the coming days and coming weeks — there are a lot of individuals who are citizens who shouldn’t be. And just like we have an absolute duty to the citizens of this country to get illegal aliens out, ’cause they have no right to be here, we have the same obligation to enforce the laws when it comes to naturalized citizens who committed a fraud or did something improper in getting that citizenship,” he said.
And looming Supreme Court rulings could decide whether hundreds of thousands of people will be stripped of deportation protections that have allowed them to work legally in the country, and whether future generations of children born in the US to undocumented immigrants and immigrants here on temporary visas will continue to be considered legal American citizens.
Meanwhile, Gelatt says administration officials’ statements and actions are sending a clear message.
“It seems like the real goal is to cut immigration and to make it harder for people, even legal immigrants in the United States, to stay in the United States,” she says.
