Immigration Enforcement Expands Across Multiple Federal Agencies
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expanded its emergency health restrictions to bar green card holders — lawful permanent residents — from reentering the United States from Ebola-affected countries, reversing an explicit exemption contained in the original May 18th Title 42 order that had only blocked foreign nationals without permanent residency. The change represented a significant departure from the traditionally strong reentry rights afforded to permanent residents.
Separately, US Citizenship and Immigration Services directed adjudicating officers to treat in-country green card applications as extraordinary rather than routine, instructing them to favor consular processing abroad except in exceptional circumstances. The policy effectively requires many applicants to leave the United States to complete their cases, increasing costs, risking family separation, and introducing uncertainty about reentry.
The Trump administration also moved immigration lawyers from other federal agencies to the Department of Justice to accelerate denaturalization proceedings — legal actions to revoke citizenship from naturalized Americans. Denaturalization has historically been used sparingly, reserved primarily for cases involving fraud or war crimes, making the reported surge in such efforts a significant departure from past practice.
The Internal Revenue Service was reportedly considering adding citizenship questions to federal tax forms, a step that would create a new data collection mechanism with potential immigration enforcement applications. Critics noted that the traditional separation of tax compliance from immigration status had practical benefits: people are more likely to pay taxes when they do not fear that doing so will trigger removal proceedings. Senate Democrats called for a bipartisan investigation of a separate Trump IRS settlement, though details of that settlement were not publicly available.
Taken together, the simultaneous tightening of green card processing, expanded use of public health authority to restrict reentry, accelerated denaturalization, and potential immigration-linked tax form changes represented a cumulative shift affecting millions of people in various stages of immigration proceedings. Legal scholars noted unresolved constitutional questions about deploying IRS authority — which derives from the revenue clauses of the Constitution — for immigration enforcement purposes.