A few weeks ago, New York immigration lawyer Pouyan Darian sought to reassure lawful permanent residents that it was safe to travel outside the United States without jeopardizing their status under the Trump administration. With rare exceptions, he said in a viral YouTube video, those with green cards have the “absolute right” to reenter the country.
Darian is rethinking his advice. Several recent federal enforcement actions against green-card holders have gained widespread notoriety and cast a cloud of fear and anxiety over many of the nation’s estimated 12.8 million lawful permanent residents whose legal rights to live and work in the country once gave them confidence that they were immune from President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
The number of confirmed detentions appears limited to a handful of highly publicized incidents, including the arrests of a pair of campus activists in New York, a German national returning to New England from an overseas trip, and a Filipina woman in Seattle who has lived in the United States for three decades.
But those apprehensions along with reports – including a viral Tik Tok video – of legal permanent residents being interrogated at U.S. airport checkpoints and pressured to sign forms renouncing their status have fanned rumors on social media, prompted green-card holders to cancel travel plans and generated a flood of frantic calls to immigration attorneys.
Darian says his counsel to clients has “absolutely changed” and he is now telling them to consider holding off on traveling because “you are subjecting yourself to scrutiny when you attempt to reenter the United States.”
“I didn’t expect them to go after green-card holders,” he said in an interview. He posted a new video on Wednesday warning that the Trump administration is going to begin focusing on permanent residents.
Those concerns come as the Trump administration, frustrated that the pace of deportations is falling short of his ambitious quotas, has taken more aggressive action in recent weeks, including deporting 238 migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador without legal due process. The administration’s apparent willingness to expand its deportation campaign to immigrants who are in the country legally highlights a new phase in Trump’s immigration crackdown, legal analysts said.
Asked whether the administration is enacting stricter vetting, Hilton Beckham, an assistant commissioner at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said in a statement: “The Trump Administration is enforcing immigration laws – something the previous administration failed to do. Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required. Green-card holders who have not broken any U.S. laws, committed application fraud, or failed to apply for a reentry permit after a long period of travel have nothing to fear about entering and exiting the country.”
Next to U.S. citizens, green-card holders have traditionally enjoyed the most expansive legal rights, and lawful permanent residency has long been a stepping stone for migrants to pursue naturalization. Under federal immigration law, green-card holders cannot vote but are allowed to live and work in the U.S. They also may travel abroad provided they are not facing criminal charges and do not remain outside the U.S. for extended periods.
Concerns among some green-card holders grew in late February when a woman posted a TikTok video warning that her niece, a 23-year-old nursing student with a green card, had been arrested and deported after attempting to reenter the country at Los Angeles International Airport, after attending the funeral of her mother in Laos.
In mid-March, two highly publicized arrests of green-card holders further inflamed fears. Federal authorities detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University, accusing him of supporting Hamas. Khalil, whose wife is due to give birth next month, is being held at a federal immigration facility in Louisiana. His lawyer has called his detention an unlawful act from the Trump administration targeting Khalil’s political beliefs.
Days later, customs agents at Boston’s Logan International Airport detained Fabian Schmidt, a lawful permanent U.S. resident since 2008 who was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to his native Germany. Schmidt’s mother told reporters that he had been violently interrogated and pressured to sign an I-407 document renouncing his green-card status. He is being detained in Rhode Island, awaiting an immigration court hearing in June.
DHS officials have disputed accounts of Schmidt’s mistreatment and pointed to reports that he faced a misdemeanor marijuana charge in 2015, which was later dismissed, and a conviction for driving while intoxicated.
“People are terrified, completely freaked out,” said Joshua Goldstein, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer. “I’m even getting questions from U.S. citizens asking, ‘Can I travel?’”
Goldstein pointed to Vice President JD Vance’s March 13 appearance on Fox News in which, asked about Khalil’s arrest, he asserted that green-card holders do not “have an indefinite right to be in the United States of America.” Vance said the issue, at its core, is not about free speech or national security, but rather represents a fundamental debate about who is allowed to be part of American society.
“If the secretary of state and the president decide this person shouldn’t be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here, it’s as simple as that,” the vice president said.
Goldstein said the Trump administration is clearly signaling that the mass deportation effort is far larger than only going after immigrants who entered the country illegally.
“If they are making permanent residents and U.S. citizens with immigrant backgrounds fearful, that’s quite different than actually going after people with criminal records,” he said.
Immigration lawyers interviewed by The Washington Post said their offices have been inundated with calls from green-card holders seeking advice. They said many have decided to cancel or postpone vacations, honeymoons or visits to relatives abroad, including for funerals of family members. Similar accounts have been posted in the comments sections of social media sites, including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit.
But green-card holders have been reluctant to speak publicly over concern that they could become targets of the Trump administration, according to conversations with more than half a dozen immigration attorneys and several lawful permanent residents contacted by The Post.
A Venezuelan man who works in the medical industry in Ohio said in an interview that he sought refugee status in the United States in 2019 and was awarded a green card in 2022. Last summer, he married an American woman, and they were hoping to plan a honeymoon in Spain as they awaited his refugee travel documents that some green-card holders use in lieu of a passport.
The couple initially agreed to allow The Post to identify them but later requested anonymity out of fear that doing so could invite more scrutiny from the government. After Trump was elected, they decided to take their honeymoon this month in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, out of an abundance of caution.
“It’s a really scary thought that he could be forced to go somewhere – forced to go somewhere without me,” the wife said of the prospect that her husband could be detained or deported. “Yeah, it’s emotional.”
Another man, from South America, who got a green card a decade ago after being sponsored by his American spouse and works in communications on the West Coast, said that his anxiety has increased in the past several months.
“Am I scared? I think the more precise word is to say that I’m worried,” he said. “I feel kind of, in my day-to-day life, pretty safe … It’s more that I’m uncertain, and I have a lot of questions of what to do with my life: Should I apply for citizenship? Should I leave the country? Should I have plans?”
Some legal experts cautioned that it is too early to assess how broadly the Trump administration is planning to go after green-card holders.
LaToya McBean Pompy, an immigration lawyer in White Plains, New York, said she routinely handled cases before Trump took office from clients whose immigration status was flagged at airport checkpoints. The anxiety of some green-card holders, she suggested, has been accentuated by the sheer aggression of the Trump administration’s overall immigration enforcement tactics.
McBean Pompy pointed to a spate of cellphone videos captured by bystanders that have been posted to social media depicting federal immigration agents conducting enforcement actions in local communities.
“When you see those things, you think, ‘Oh, wow, this is getting closer to me,’” she said.
Legal analysts said it should be no surprise that the Trump administration would be willing to target green-card holders. In his first term, Trump’s administration sharply cut the number of green cards the U.S. government issued over four years by more than 418,000 compared with President Barack Obama’s second term, according to an analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute.
New efforts are underway to slow down some green-card processing. The Trump administration is reportedly enacting a measure to pause applications from immigrants who have been granted refugee or asylum status, which authorities called an effort to implement stricter security vetting, according to a CBS News report.
“Directionally, this is where they’ve wanted to go the whole time. Now, they are much clearer about their intent,” said David J. Bier, Cato’s director of immigration studies. “They are crystal clear that they don’t see a distinction between one noncitizen category and another. They will arrest and deport you if you run contrary to their goals. That’s what we’re seeing.”
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