WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is halting immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries, including Brazil, Iran, Russia, and Somalia, the latest effort by officials to restrict legal immigration pathways.
State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said the indefinite pause aims to limit applicants deemed likely to become a “public charge,” a term for someone who relies on government benefits for their basic needs. The order takes effect Jan. 21, and a full list of the countries on the administration’s list has not been released.
“The Trump administration is bringing an end to the abuse of America’s immigration system by those who would extract wealth from the American people,” Pigott said.
The State Department has ramped up efforts in recent months to restrict migration, particularly from nations the president has deemed a threat to national security. Last month, the administration expanded a full or partial travel ban on entry to the United States to citizens of 39 countries, a move that came after an Afghan immigrant was charged in the shooting in November of two National Guard members in D.C.
The administration also paused all asylum cases processed by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, suspended processing of citizenship and green card applications for citizens of the initial 19 countries subject to the travel ban, and suspended all immigration-related requests from Afghan nationals.
“This new announcement is effectively an immigration ban on a very significant portion of the world coming to the United States,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “While claiming the decision was motivated by public benefits, we’re seeing an administration intent on demolishing nearly all legal pathways for immigrants to come to the United States from countries where people are overwhelmingly Brown and Black.”
Massachusetts immigrant communities and advocates responded to the new visa processing suspension with confusion and concern over what the new restrictions would mean for families seeking to reunite in the United States.
Many were still unsure about how exactly the pause would play out, with few details released, or what might hold up following expected court challenges. But those who work with immigrant families forcefully pushed back on the Trump administration’s characterization that a wide swath of immigrants coming from the 75 restricted countries were relying on public assistance.
“With my own clients, I see a lot of people paying Social Security and paying taxes that they’ll never see the benefit of, so if you just look at the numbers instead of the hysteria, you’ll see that all of that is absolutely not true,” said Kira Gagarin, an immigration attorney based in Framingham. “It’s just more cruelty and more torture and more hardship for regular, hardworking people that have been waiting years and years to be together.”
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, estimated that the pause on visa processing “will ban nearly half of all legal immigrants to the United States, turning away about 315,000 legal immigrants over the next year.”
Fox News Digital first reported the decision, citing a State Department cable explaining the change to consular officers.
The order will not affect processing for nonimmigrant visas — a category that include students and tourists — officials said. That means fans seeking temporary entry to the United States to attend World Cup soccer matches this summer are unlikely to be affected, immigration experts said.
Trump has long complained that immigrants are a drain on public resources, even though studies show that their labor benefits the US economy. The president has targeted Minnesota amid allegations that day care providers in the state improperly collected millions of federal dollars, with state and federal fraud investigations underway into 14 Minnesota-run safety net programs, including for child nutrition, housing, and autism assistance.
The US attorney’s office for Minnesota has said Somali Americans make up 82 of the 92 defendants in the fraud investigations, and Trump has seized on the fraud allegations to denigrate Somali immigrants. He said in a Cabinet meeting last month that he doesn’t want Somali immigrants in the US and referred to them as “garbage.”
The Department of Homeland Security in November proposed scrapping federal public charge regulations implemented by the Biden administration in 2022 that govern how applicants can be deemed ineligible for US visas. The agency said the existing regulations “hamper DHS’s ability to make accurate, precise, and reliable determinations of whether certain aliens are likely at any time to become a public charge.”
Immigrant rights groups have assailed the proposal, saying the Trump administration is seeking to replace the regulations with far stricter measures that would deny visas to immigrants who could rely on a range of benefits, including medical care and food. Undocumented immigrants — and many legal immigrants, too — are ineligible for most federal benefits, though some states offer access to health and food benefits.
“The likely result will be that many immigrant families will be afraid to access any public benefits for which a household member is eligible, forgoing supports in times of need to preserve future immigration prospects,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the US immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis posted Wednesday.
Alan D. Viard, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the administration’s efforts to tighten public charge regulations “unnecessary.”
“Even immigrants who appear at first glance to pose a fiscal burden may actually provide a net fiscal contribution due to indirect and long-term effects,” he wrote in an analysis last month.
Anjali Huynh of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
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