The government agency responsible for issuing visas and green cards will soon be deploying its own armed law enforcement officers to investigate and arrest immigrants and their lawyers.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has created a new class of special agents tasked with “making arrests, carrying firearms, executing search and arrest warrants, and other powers standard for federal law enforcement,” according to the agency.
Thursday’s announcement marks a significant escalation in Donald Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, which is now tasking an agency that largely involves administering immigrant benefits — including handling applications for citizenship, asylum and other lawful status — with law enforcement.
“USCIS has always been an enforcement agency,” director Joseph Edlow said in a statement Thursday. “By upholding the integrity of our immigration system, we enforce the laws of this nation.”
The agency’s “historic moment” will “better address immigration crimes, hold those that perpetrate immigration fraud accountable, and act as a force multiplier” for Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies, Edlow said.
USCIS will train several hundred agents to search for fraud in immigration applications, with the power to arrest both the applicants and lawyers who helped prepare their petitions — actions that are typically under the purview of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The change will allow ICE and other Homeland Security agents to “focus on disrupting transnational crime and capturing and deporting illegal aliens” while allowing USCIS to “more efficiently clear its backlogs of aliens who seek to exploit our immigration system through fraud, prosecute them, and remove them from the country,” the agency announced.
“This is unlawful,” said Allen Orr Jr., former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “USCIS’ mandate is to adjudicate applications, not run raids. Trump’s expansion beyond traditional enforcement shatters the law’s clear limits.”
Under Ludlow’s direction, USCIS has radically overhauled how the agency approaches immigration, moving the agency from a largely administrative role into a key law enforcement tool supporting the president’s mass deportation efforts.
Federal agents have also made arrests at USCIS offices and other immigration facilities as people arrive for court-ordered check-ins with ICE or for citizenship interviews and other hearings, with immigration judges and officials ordered to swiftly dismiss cases, making immigrants easy targets for arrest.
“You really don’t have an immigration system if the agency that issues immigration benefits is now a third enforcement agency,” said Andrea R. Flores, an immigration policy adviser during the Biden and Obama administrations.
“Why would anyone come forward when the admin keeps penalizing people using the legal immigration system?” she wrote.
USCIS is also vetting for evidence of alleged “anti-American” activity on social media, sending officers to perform “neighborhood checks” on citizenship applicants, and heightening scrutiny into prospective citizens’ “good moral character.”
In May, USCIS announced the agency was “immediately” reviewing immigrants’ social media accounts for what it considers “antisemitic activity” that could be used as evidence to deny them legal status in the United States. The new screening measures follow similar guidance from other agencies as the Trump administration targets dissent against Israel’s war in Gaza, which officials have broadly characterized as antisemitic.
Voting rights and good government groups that help newly minted citizens register to vote are also now barred from naturalization ceremonies under USCIS policy announced this week.
The agency also is prioritizing denaturalization cases alongside the Department of Justice, which announced plans in June to “maximally pursue” stripping benefits from foreign-born citizens.
Edlow also wants to overhaul how citizenship applicants are tested.
He’s considering a “standardized test format” that would require test takers to write an essay answering “what does it mean to me to be an American,” Edlow said at an event organized by the Center for Immigration Studies, moments after Thursday’s announcement.
“What this comes down to is I am declaring war on fraud,” he said.
