On November 26, 2025, two National Guard members were shot near the White House. One died. DHS identified the suspect as an Afghan national admitted under Operation Allies Welcome in 2021. The immigration consequences arrived within hours and have not stopped since.
The same day, USCIS announced that processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals was stopped indefinitely. On November 27 it issued a policy alert telling officers to treat country-specific factors, including a country's inability to issue secure identity documents, as significant negatives in any discretionary decision. And on December 2, Director Joseph Edlow signed Policy Memorandum PM-602-0192, effective immediately. It is the broadest single administrative action on asylum in recent memory, and it is worth reading precisely.
What the memo does
Three things.
First, it holds every pending asylum application. Every Form I-589, asylum and withholding of removal, regardless of the applicant's nationality, is placed on hold pending what the memo calls a comprehensive review. An applicant from Colombia, Ukraine or China is affected exactly as one from Afghanistan.
Second, it holds every pending benefit request from nationals of 19 countries. These are the countries named in Presidential Proclamation 10949 of June 4, 2025. Full suspension: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Partial: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. The hold applies to anyone listing one of these as country of birth or citizenship, regardless of when they entered. The memo names green card applications (I-485), card replacements (I-90), removal of conditions (I-751), travel documents (I-131) and naturalization-related filings (N-470) as examples, not as the full list.
Third, it orders a re-review of benefits already approved for nationals of those 19 countries who entered the United States on or after January 20, 2021, by any route: admitted, paroled, or without inspection. This is the green card re-review that has drawn the most attention. Interviews for this population may not be waived, and re-interviews are contemplated. Within 90 days the agency is to produce a priority list for review, re-interview and referral to ICE.
The hold stays in place until the Director lifts it by a subsequent memorandum. No date is given.
What it does not do
It does not deny anything. An application on hold is delayed, not refused. Nor does it stop the screening interviews at the border: credible fear, reasonable fear and the related threshold screenings continue, because the memo defines "benefit request" to exclude them. Asylum interviews at USCIS offices are still being scheduled. What has stopped is the issuance of decisions.
The review criteria are national-security criteria: presence in the terrorist screening dataset, associations described in the terrorism and security grounds of the INA, links to aggravated felonies or the criminal inadmissibility grounds, and inability to establish identity. For the overwhelming majority of applicants none of that applies. The delay applies to them anyway.
What to expect
- An indefinite wait. For asylum applicants whose cases have already been pending for years, this is one more year. The annual asylum fee, incidentally, continues to accrue on pending cases, though its collection is currently paused by court order in a separate case.
- Notices. Interview notices, requests for evidence and, for the 19-country population, re-interview notices even where a benefit was approved years ago.
- A full stop on everything for nationals of the 19 countries: green cards, card renewals, travel documents and removal of conditions all sit.
What to do
- Keep your address current with USCIS. A notice that goes to an old address is not the agency's problem.
- Keep copies of every prior approval, and of the evidence you filed to get it. A re-review is a second adjudication; treat it as one.
- Do not travel internationally without advice, particularly if you are from one of the 19 countries. A pending I-131 will not be decided, and re-entry on an approved one is not guaranteed.
- If a work permit is expiring, file the renewal now. Work permits for pending asylum applicants are not named in the hold, but the automatic extension is gone and processing is slow.
No court had lifted the hold as of this writing. Litigation has been filed and will take months. For now the instruction to everyone with a pending asylum case is the least satisfying one in immigration law: wait, and keep your file in order.