Sarah Edgecomb

US immigration lawyer

[Adrian Pandev @adrianpandev]

This is exactly the part of the AOS debate getting missed.

This isn't only about immigrants' rights. It's about US citizens too. Roughly 1 in 5 married couples in the US includes a spouse born abroad. That's not a fringe group, it's 21% of married couple households.

When an American marries someone here lawfully on a visa, adjustment of status is how their spouse gets a green card without leaving the country.

Take that away and you are telling US citizens their husband or wife has to leave the US to process a visa abroad. They spend months (and often years) apart, and there is no guarantee they are allowed back in.

If there are US citizen kids, you are now separating them from a parent too.

That's not just an immigrant problem. That's a US citizen losing the right to live in their own country with the family they built here, even though their spouse followed every rule.

[Cyrus Mehta @cyrusmehta]

While adjustment of status is discretionary under INA 245 it has never been interpreted as an extraordinary form of relief and USCIS is inventing a new standard to deprive noncitizens from getting green cards in the US.

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

Breaking news: The Trump administration will require most foreigners seeking green cards to apply from outside the U.S., a shift that lawyers said could affect thousands of people who file applications each year while living in America on temporary visas. https://t.co/pgwTKtf9gr

[Daniel Larson 蓝丹烨 @daniel_s_larson]

The state of legal immigration in the U.S.:

Absolute chaos.

-Employer-sponsored green card paths are tenuous. PERM is broken, with 15+ month adjudication times. NIW filings are surging, and I suspect EB-1A filings are too.

-Family-based cases are facing more scrutiny. The country bans and adjudicative holds are taking their toll, and who is affected remains extremely confusing.

-People with legitimate cases are paying filing fees while seeing little to no service rendered. Costs are rising for both practitioners and clients.

-Immigration judges are being fired and replaced with inexperienced, politically favorable appointees.

-The bright spots: litigation is working. O-1s are still moving. E-2s remain a viable path.

But overall: legal immigration is becoming more expensive, more unpredictable, and more chaotic.

[Emily Neumann @immigrationgirl]

Heads up for a new reason to delay I-485 application approvals-more vetting

[Charles Kuck @ckuck]

Lawyers who have attended USCIS interivews for resident status this week, have been told by officers that adjudications (final decisions) are put on hold "becuase of the shooting on Saturday night."

This is @USCISJoe and the farce that has become of @USCIS. Any excuse to deprive folks of the benefits they paid for. Classic Nativist, Know-Nothing stupidity.

[John Hudson @John_Hudson]

Scoop: The Trump administration is taking new measures to block potential asylum seekers, per a State Dept cable. Visa applicants are now required to answer whether they fear returning home. If they answer yes, they don't get a visa

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

I bring the receipts showing Trump has gone against every pro-legal immigration promise he's made. https://t.co/rlgcsStrYE

[Sarah Edgecomb @SarahEdgecomb]

“The administration includes criticism of Israel as a potentially disqualifying factor, with the training materials citing as an example of questionable speech a social media post that declares, ‘Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine’ and shows the Israeli flag crossed out.”

[Hamed Aleaziz @Haleaziz]

Scoop: immigrants can now be denied a green card for expressing political opinions, such as participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests, posting criticism of Israel on social media and desecrating the American flag, according to internal documents.

w/ @NickNehamas

[NFAPResearch @NFAPResearch]

Trump admin has made it difficult for even the most highly skilled people in the world to work in America. The denial rate for a green card for an alien with extraordinary ability nearly doubled to 46.6% by end of FY 2025. @David_J_Bier @gsiskind @SIIA_US https://t.co/zCDCtq9ogb

[Jackie Llanos @LlanosJackie]

I spoke with four DACA recipients who say they've lost their jobs because USCIS hasn't renewed their status and work permits. Read my latest:
https://t.co/VhYmPjbjFF

[Sarah Edgecomb @SarahEdgecomb]

@ReichlinMelnick Do we know if it’s all visa processing or just all immigrant visa processing? I think the initial Fox News report just referred to immigrant visas. It would be helpful to see the memo or have some more detailed reporting to clarify whether this also applies to nonimmigrant visas.

[Hamed Aleaziz @Haleaziz]

SCOOP: The Trump administration plans to ramp up efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by The New York Times.

https://t.co/KRUmTJzgfr

[Emily Neumann @immigrationgirl]

Employment-based I-485 applicants will now see EADs issued for 18 months instead of 5 years effective December 5, 2025. This likely means the same for Advance Paroles. It would not be a big deal if renewals were processed timely. Unfortunately, it just creates more filings, which increases the backlog of cases, which increases processing times. This coupled with the elimination of the automatic EAD renewal for pending applications will just cause people to have to stop work for no good reason.

[Matt Duss @mattduss]

If you want to know why Pete Hegseth is confident he'll face no consequences for blatant war crimes, just look at the list of people who attended Dick Cheney's funeral.

[Hamed Aleaziz @Haleaziz]

The @nytimes reported this was coming nearly 2 weeks ago: https://t.co/ErqTpjcNho

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

WOW. Federal prosecutors just dismissed charges against the Chicago woman shot by a Border Patrol agent five times. They accused her initially of pulling a gun on them (which video apparently showed was false) then said she rammed the agents’s car. Now they’re dropping charges.

[Hamed Aleaziz @Haleaziz]

Scoop: The Trump administration is planning a policy change that could make it harder for immigrants to get green cards and other approvals if they are from countries subject to the president’s travel ban, according to internal documents.

https://t.co/M67KqViehU

[Jonathan Martin @jmart]

The 2,349th reminder that Maga is what Trump thinks it is, not a coherent ideological project, and the real policy reckoning is coming

Today's @WSJ
Trump vs. Vance on Legal Immigration

Do legal immigrants enrich America or damage it? That’s one of the debates now emerging on the political right, including it seems even in the White House. President Trump says the U.S. needs skilled foreign workers, while Vice President JD Vance is signaling that he wants far fewer immigrants even if they arrive legally.

Mr. Trump made his views clear in an interview Tuesday with Laura Ingraham, a longtime opponent of immigration. Asking about curbs on H-1B visas for high-skilled workers, the Fox News host told the President that “if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.”

Mr. Trump pushed back: “I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent.” Ms. Ingraham retorted: “We have plenty of talented people here.” Mr. Trump rejoined: “You don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where you’re going to make missiles.’” He then criticized his Administration’s immigration raid on a Hyundai-LG Energy Solution battery plant in Georgia when hundreds of South Korean nationals were detained. “They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages to make batteries and to teach people how to do it,” he said. Immigration agents “wanted them to get out of the country. You’re going to need” them.

He’s right. Nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, including Nvidia, Google and Tesla, were founded by immigrants or their children. A quarter of billion-dollar U.S. startups were founded by an immigrant who arrived as an international student. These are often the people who remain in the U.S. after graduation on H-1B visas. Mr. Trump seems to recognize it is selfdestructive to train these students and then send them back to India or China instead of building firms here.

As for Mr. Vance, he replied to an immigration question at a Turning Point USA event last month this way: “My honest view is that, right now, America, thanks in part to the Biden border invasion, but also thanks in part to a lot of bad immigration policy, right now, we have let in too many immigrants.” He also said legal immigrants “are undercutting the wages of American workers.”

On wages, Mr. Vance is repeating the lump of labor fallacy that American and foreign workers compete for a limited number of jobs. Studies have generally found that immigration raises average wages and employment of native- born workers, in part because their work is complementary. Economists from the University of California, Davis, last year calculated that immigrants increased wages for less educated native workers by 1.7% to 2.6% between 2000 and 2019. The current labor market bears this out, as many industries continue to report trouble finding able workers. About half of small businesses report few or no qualified applicants for job openings. The National Foundation for American Policy recently projected that the Trump restrictions on legal immigration will reduce the U.S. workforce by 2.8 million and GDP by $882 billion by 2028.

This is in addition to the impact of the Administration’s mass deportation strategy, which has removed more than a half million illegal migrants. Many of those removed have been in the U.S. for years and are valuable employees.

Mr. Vance conceded at Turning Point that “many immigrants do in fact enrich the United States of America.” But he called for limiting legal immigration anyway. Why? “We have got to become a common community again. And you can’t do that when you have such high numbers of immigration,” he said. “We have got to get our overall numbers way, way down.”

But they already are down. Illegal immigration has ground to a halt, with Southwest border encounters down by some 95% from the Biden surge levels. The Administration has also taken steps to reduce legal immigration, including charging $100,000 for an H-1B visa.

To the extent Mr. Vance wants immigrants to assimilate to American constitutional principles and other norms, he has a good point. The U.S. doesn’t want ethnic ghettos, such as the French Muslim banlieues . But the U.S. has long demonstrated an ability to assimilate ethnic minorities, even in large numbers.

Think of the Irish in the 19th century, Italians in the early 20th, or multiple Asian ethnicities today. The children of these immigrants learn English, attend American schools and most of the time absorb U.S. values. They certainly work hard. More than a quarter of Hispanics are marrying non-Hispanics.

The worst damage to our “common community” owes to the identity politics pressed by the political left, which includes hostility to America’s founding principles. That worldview preaches racial grievance and ethnic division, a la the New York Times 1619 project. The best response to that isn’t an identity politics of the right. It’s a reaffirmation of American principles that unites the country, as well as promoting economic growth and mobility to assure everyone has opportunity.

For all of his campaigning against illegal immigration, Mr. Trump understands that America needs the world’s strivers to continue to prosper. Perhaps he can make that case to his young apprentice.

[Pablo Manríquez @PabloReports]

More than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault, during their detention, according to a Human Rights Watch report published on Wednesday. https://t.co/fx5C8dmMkC