President Donald Trump’s latest immigration crackdown is triggering alarm, confusion, and fierce debate among lawyers, advocates, and many in the business world who rely on visa holders for skilled labor.
On Friday, US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it would grant “adjustment of status” — the process that allows some immigrants already in the US to apply for a green card without leaving the country — “only in extraordinary circumstances,” potentially forcing many applicants to return to their home countries and wait abroad while their cases are processed.
While a USCIS spokesperson told Business Insider that applicants who “provide an economic benefit or otherwise are in the national interest” may still qualify for exemptions, it remains unclear how broadly the administration plans to enforce the new restrictions or how many immigrants could ultimately be affected.
The administration has framed the move as a return to the original intent of immigration law, while critics warn it could upend the lives of foreign workers, mixed-status families, and long-term visa holders who have relied on the process for decades.
Here’s what smart people are saying about the sweeping policy shift.
Blake Scholl
Blake Scholl
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Blake Scholl, founder and CEO at Boom Supersonic, a company developing a supersonic airliner, said on X that he understands why “we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals” and “mooch on welfare.”
“But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity,” Scholl added.
Nick Davidov
Nick Davidov, the founder of Davidovs Venture Collective, a VC that supports repeat AI founders at the seed level, called the changes in the green card application rules “the biggest bullshit move by DHS in its history” and the “worst imaginable way to disrupt important work for the country.”
“So everyone on a O1 or H1B visa would have to stop working legally in the US, go back to their country and wait for years of backlog?” Davidov wrote on X on Friday. “This includes top scientists in our universities, founders of billion dollar companies.”
Davidov added in subsequent tweets that Iranians and Ukrainians can’t really return to their home countries for safety reasons, and that immigrants such as Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and Sergey Brin have created some of the country’s most valuable companies.
Andrew Ng
Andrew Ng
Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference
Andrew Ng, AI entrepreneur and cofounder of Coursera, called asking green card applicants to apply outside the US only “a capricious attack on legal immigration.”
“It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI,” Ng wrote on X on Friday.
Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and a prominent Trump critic in Silicon Valley, wrote on X that the DHS’s new policies are a “harmful move for tech, business, and America broadly.”
“Does this mean AI Researchers, employees, and students will now have to leave the country and wait through a backlog process to continue their work?” Hoffman wrote.
Yvette Clarke
Rep. Yvette Clarke
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York, called the new green card policies “a disgrace.”
“It will rip talented, hardworking immigrants out from America and our economy, congest an already overburdened backlog, and further break an already broken immigration system,” said Clarke on X.
“And that’s by design,” Clarke added. “This administration has made the pain of immigrants a priority, and that won’t change until there’s no one left to hurt.”
David J. Bier
David J. Bier
Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, called for new leadership of USCIS in a series of posts on X on Friday, where he said that the new policies show “total malice against the applicants.”
“The policy is a radical expansion of DHS’s ‘quiet quitting’ on legal immigration that has been going on for months,” Bier also wrote in a blog post. “Now USCIS’s new memorandum details a plan for mass denials. USCIS has gone from the ‘quiet-quit’ to walking out on 1.2 million green card applicants.”
“Forcing green card applicants to leave will render many green card applicants ineligible because, when they leave the United States, they will trigger the 3- or 10-year bars on receiving an immigrant visa based on accrual of unlawful presence,” Bier added.
Yann LeCun
Yann LeCun
Yui Mok – Pool/Getty Images
Yann LeCun, a pioneer in AI research and the former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, had a very curt and perplexed response to the change in green card policy.
“Why?” wrote the ACM Turing Award Laureate on X, who reposted an article detailing the DHS’s announcement.
LeCun was born in France and immigrated to the US in the late 1980s.
Garry Tan
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan
Hutton Supancic/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images
Garry Tan, the CEO of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, called the new guidance “bad and misguided.”
“We need to keep smart people in the country to build the future and build tomorrow’s businesses that employ millions of people,” he wrote on X.
Ash Jogalekar
Ash Jogalekar, a Microsoft senior project manager working on agentic AI, described the memorandum as “self-sabotage” in an X post on Friday.
“As a scientist and immigrant who loves this country, I cannot think of worse ways to cripple American scientific competitiveness while other countries surge ahead,” Jogalekar wrote. “It is completely pointless. Between the funding cuts and rash, irrational policies like these, China could not have done worse if they had decided to sabotage science in the U.S.”
