Let's talk about the new executive order from President Trump.
on April 22nd, 2020, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order that is going to restrict some immigrants from coming to the United States.
On the 20th of April, he had sent out a tweet saying that he was going to stop immigration temporarily to the United States. Now, everyone waited to see what would actually be in the executive order.
It turns out that the president has really backed off what he originally tweeted, which is no surprise.
Anyone who follows the president knows that he announces policies before he actually drafts them.
That's the situation that we had here.
Where on Monday, he says he's going to temporarily stop immigration in the United States for up to 60 days. And then on Tuesday, he had a press conference where he sort of mumbled through this need to protect the American worker and how he's going to sign this harsh immigration bill and sort of stop the immigrants from coming.
But yesterday we get the actual executive order, and it is a whole lot less harsh than it could have been or that people were anticipating.
The executive order itself is a few pages long. The key section that you want to read up on is Section 2.
Section 2 makes it clear that the executive order applies to immigrants who are outside of the United States as of April 22nd, 2020.
So the executive order first and foremost doesn't apply to people who are already in the United States. People going through the immigration process here in United States are not affected.
It also applies to people who don't have an immigrant visa, like people that don't have an advanced parole document or some kind of ability to get back to the United States or in the United States.
But who does it not apply to? I think it's easier to analyze this order by looking at all the people that it does not apply to.
So first of all, as I mentioned, it doesn't apply to people who are already in the United States or if you are in the United States and you're applying for citizenship or if you're applying to remove the conditions on your green card or if you're applying for a green card itself.
This rule does not apply to you.
This rule applies to the embassies.
It prohibits the embassies from issuing certain kinds of visas.
From a fundamental standpoint, understand that this will not affect what's going on at USCIS or frankly, what isn't going on because USCIS is acting so slowly now in the wake of the Coronavirus epidemic.
It's not going to affect the green card holders, or people who are applying for green cards.
It doesn't apply to health care professionals. It doesn't apply to the spouses of U.S. citizens.
So that's a real important issue. A lot of our clients were calling, texting, emailing and wondering, am I going to be able to bring my spouse here under Trump's new rule?
So the executive order very clearly has a carve out for the spouses of U.S. citizens.
It has a similar carve out for the minor children of U.S. citizens. So the under age 21 children of U.S. citizens are exempted from this ban. It doesn't apply to the spouses of U.S. citizens or the children of U.S. citizens. It also curiously doesn't apply to any non-immigrant visa.
A lot of people thought that this was going to apply to H-1B visa holders or other non-immigrant visa holders like F1's students, M1 students, J1 students, those are all international students or other non-immigrant visas.
This also doesn't apply to fiancee visas. Technically a fiancee visa, a K1 visa, is a non-immigrant visa, The executive order clearly does not apply to non-immigrant visas.
And then there's a couple other little sections that won't apply to most people, like people that are coming on a special immigrant visa or coming to help law enforcement.
You don't hear about that often. It doesn't apply to them either.
That's what doesn't apply to the order.
It also says that it does not impact the ability of people to apply for asylum. For people in the United States who are applying for asylum, that is going to go on its own twisted way.
Of course, they've been assaulting US asylum seekers for years now, but this order does not apply to people who are in the United States seeking asylum.
So who does it apply to?
And this is the troubling part, the upsetting part. These are the people that are affected. And it just shows you how arbitrary it is. It just shows you how ill thought out it is. It just shows you that Trump is just making this up as he goes along.
He has his little minions writing his executive orders as if they're law and they have the effect of of law, but they're not, so they're not given the same validity or protections by the courts, so it'll be interesting to see what happens.
So it applies to the parents of U.S. citizens.
If you're a U.S. citizen and you applied for your parents and they're about to go to the embassy to get their visa under this order, they can't get their visa.
It also applies to the adult children of U.S. citizens. So if a U.S. citizen has sponsored their adult child to come to the United States, they are not going to be able to come at least for these next 60 days, which is the effective time period, allegedly of the ban.
It says in there specifically that he reserves the right to extend it. And of course, he always does.
I saw one of his flunkies, Mark Meadows, on television yesterday talking about "This ban will go away just like the other bans have".
But they haven't. The other bans are still in effect.
So I don't know what that clown is talking about.
It also applies to the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens.
So that's really troubling because these people have been waiting 13-14 years and now here comes Trump for no good reason and just bans them from coming.
Here's where it's really going to be hard, so lawful permanent residents who are in the United States can apply for their spouses and their children.
But Trump's ban prohibits embassies from issuing visas, immigrant visas to come to the United States for the spouses and children of lawful permanent residents.
So that's pretty troubling.
It also is going to apply to diversity visa lottery winners. So the diversity visa allows people to go through this two and a half year process where you apply, you get picked in a lottery and then you try to get a visa overseas.
The diversity visa holders, the people who've won that lottery, they're all going to be prohibited for the next 60 days.
That's especially problematic for them, because if they don't get their visas by September 30th, they're going to lose their lottery ticket.
They're going to lose their spot in the queue and they're going to have to reapply.
So the Trump administration and Republicans in general are very hostile to the diversity visa.
They think it is something that allows poor people to come to the United States and they have this fiction that we need to get rid of that so that we can give more employment based visas.
But Diversity visa holders who are diversity visa lottery winners who are overseas are really going to be jammed up by this new rule.
It also prohibits the issuance of any employment based visas except for health care workers.
The embassies are prohibited from issuing those except to health care workers.
So that obviously is going to affect a lot of people.
But I think for the most part, most employment based green cards are done through the adjustment process adjustment status process here in the United States as opposed to overseas.
Now, when Trump issued the Muslim bans, the travel bans earlier, those provisions eventually had waivers.
Remember, it took him three times to get it right. And it wasn't until he got the waiver in place, which, of course, is a total B.S. waiver. It doesn't really apply.
But this rule doesn't seem to have any waivers. So I think that might make it subject to extra special judicial scrutiny.
So one thing I want to make clear is that, as I said, this rule applies to getting visas overseas.
Even in these cases where the rule is going to apply, Trump says it's only gonna be 60 days.
What you need to know is that if you are interested in starting the process, you should still file because USCIS will still issue receipts for these kinds of cases.
USCIS will continue to process these kinds of cases.
USCIS will even continue to approve these kinds of cases.
And then they'll be sent to the National Visa Center where it starts the paperwork with the State Department.
So in theory, if this thing only lasts 60 or 90 or 120 days, if you apply now, your case wasn't gonna be going to the embassy anytime soon.
So it makes sense to still go ahead and still process and still do your best to get your place in line.
People who are going to be most impacted by this are those who are just about to get their visas. The people who are in line who've already gone through USCIS, who've already gone through the National Visa Center, who've already had the embassy interview, perhaps those are the ones who are going to be immediately impacted by this.
So I think there'll be lawsuits.
We're considering a lawsuit here in our office to challenge the legality of this.
There's a lot of complicated legal issues, but I do believe that there will be lawsuits to this.
There might be judges issuing orders, halting the implementation of this screwball executive order, and we'll just have to wait and see.
So we'll keep you updated about that. And speaking of being updated tomorrow, Friday, April 24th at noon Central, which is 1 o'clock Eastern and 10:00 a.m. pacific, we will be having a webinar on this issue where I will hopefully answer all of your questions.
You can register for that here.
So we'd love to have you in there.
If you have questions ahead of time you can e-mail us those questions [email protected]. You can also give us a call at (14) 961-8200.
You know, we have that Facebook group. That's where we'll be broadcasting the webinar.
We'll keep pushing it through to Facebook live.
And that'll be in our group, which is called Immigrant Home. So you should really join immigrant home. We've been updating it every day this week with all this Trump news and we always do.
Let everybody know about the details of the new ban by Trump. And as always, make sure that you vote in the elections in November.
Hold this clown accountable for his harsh anti-immigrant stance.
Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
