Immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens have long expected that they won’t be deported from the country while going through the process of obtaining a green card.
But new guidance from Donald Trump’s administration explicitly states that immigrants seeking lawful residence through marriage can be deported, a policy that also applies to immigrants with pending requests.
Immigration authorities can begin removal proceedings for immigrants who lack legal status and applied to become a lawful permanent resident through a citizen spouse, according to guidance from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued this month.
The policy also applies to immigrants with pending green cards through other citizen family members.
People who entered the country illegally aren’t the only ones impacted. Under new guidance, immigrants trying to get lawful status through a spouse or family member are at risk of being deported if their visas expired, or if they are among the roughly 1 million immigrants whose temporary protected status was stripped from them under the Trump administration.
Immigrants and their spouses or family members who sponsor them “should be aware that a family-based petition accords no immigration status nor does it bar removal,” the policy states.
The changes were designed to “enhance benefit integrity and identify vetting and fraud concerns” and weed out what the agency calls “fraudulent, frivolous, or non-meritorious” applications, according to USCIS.
“This guidance will improve USCIS’ capacity to vet qualifying marriages and family relationships to ensure they are genuine, verifiable, and compliant with all applicable laws,” the agency said in a statement.
Those changes, which were filed on August 1, are “effective immediately,” according to the agency.
Within the first six months of 2025, immigrants and their family members filed more than 500,000 I-130 petitions, which are the first steps in the process of obtaining legal residency through a spouse or family member.
There are more than 2.4 million pending I-130 petitions, according to USCIS data. Nearly 2 million of those petitions have been pending for more than six months. It is unclear whether those petitions involve immigrants who either lost their legal status or did not have one at the time they filed their documents.
Previously, USCIS would notify applicants about missing documents or issue a denial notice serving as a warning that their case could be rejected — with opportunities for redress.
Now, USCIS is signaling that applicants can be immediately denied and ordered to immigrant courts instead.
Outside of being born in the country, family-based immigration remains the largest and most viable path to permanent residency, accounting for nearly half of all new green card holders each year, according to USCIS data.
