Donald Trump’s administration is proposing sweeping new restrictions on work permits for certain immigrants in an attempt to discourage people from coming to the country, escalating the president’s threats to legal immigration.
The new proposal would restrict work permits to people granted humanitarian protections to legally stay in the U.S., including DACA recipients and people who don’t qualify for asylum but cannot be sent back to their home countries.
It would also effectively ban work authorization for anyone who has been arrested, even if they were never charged with a crime. Immigrants accused of being in a gang, which could rely on a broad range of criteria without a conviction, could also be denied work permits.
The proposal would also limit permits to just one year, with stricter conditions on renewal and possible automatic termination.
The proposed changes join the administration’s growing restrictions on legal immigration pathways despite the president’s insistence that federal law enforcement is targeting the “worst of the worst.”
Under Trump, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has transformed from an agency largely tasked with administering benefits — including handling applications for citizenship, asylum and other lawful status — into another law enforcement arm in the president’s mass deportation campaign.
Last week, a federal judge determined that a series of USCIS policies illegally discriminated against “countless” asylum seekers, green card applicants and people seeking citizenship “solely by the happenstance of their birth.”
The administration unlawfully used national security concerns that “mask anti-immigrant sentiments” to justify a sweeping set of immigration policies that have left thousands of people in legal limbo, U.S. District Judge John McConnell wrote Friday.
The Trump administration is also trying to strip Temporary Protected Status for tens of thousands of immigrants as well as people who are already under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision.
Tens of thousands of people who entered the country by using a Biden-era app to schedule their appearance at the U.S.-Mexico border were also told to immediately deport themselves. A judge earlier this year determined the administration unlawfully terminated their status.
Efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans — people who were not born in America but become citizens — also accelerated earlier this year, with instructions that USCIS recommend “100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in 2026. USCIS lawyers were deployed to the Department of Justice to speed up those cases.
The latest changes to work authorization are expected to cost $937 million and $2.9 billion a year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
A bulk of those costs could come from lost earnings as well as “estimated costs should employers not be able to find replacement labor,” according to government filings.
Still, DHS predicts “citizen or lawful permanent resident workers on the whole would be more likely to obtain jobs” by restricting immigrant workers while immigrants will have less “incentive” to stay in the country, documents state.
All applicants would also be required to submit to biometrics screenings for identity verification and criminal background checks.
Applicants also would need to work for an employer that uses E-Verify, a voluntary government program that determines employees’ eligibility to work in the U.S. The White House is separately proposing that all federal grant recipients enroll in the program, the biggest effort to implement the program in decades.
“Instead of working to create a more functional immigration system, the Trump [administration] is doing everything possible to cut off the avenues that exist for people to come to the US lawfully, maintain a status while here, and to feed themselves and their families throughout the process,” according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
“We are deeply concerned that the end result of the USCIS’s new proposal will be more instability and chaos for families, businesses, and communities,” he added.
