Under Trump, hundreds of small changes have had a huge impact
PHILADELPHIA — Immigration lawyers call it the “no-blank-space policy.”
In 2019, the Trump administration imposed a rule requiring immigrants seeking asylum or other humanitarian relief to fill in every space on the application, even if the question doesn’t apply to them. If they leave one spot empty — say, they don’t write down a middle name, because they don’t have one — the document is rejected.
That causes more than delay in refiling. It can derail entire claims and open the door to deportation. Last week two national immigrant advocacy groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop the rule’s use.
But the blank-space policy is no outlier. It’s among hundreds of Trump administration changes in forms, regulations and fees that appear tiny and technical but that in combination significantly impact the nation’s immigration system. Now, advocates say, it’s up to the incoming Biden administration to identify and undo the often hard-to-catch revisions.
“It’s been a barrage of more restrictive rules and regulations, and even interpretations of rules and regulations,” said David Bennion, a Philadelphia lawyer and executive director of the Free Migration Project, which advocates for fair immigration laws. “It’s been hard to keep track of them all.”
The Migration Policy Institute in Washington, a nonpartisan research agency, tried to count them — and came up with more than 400 changes, big and small. Some are aimed at certain groups, like asylum-seekers, and one is targeted at immigrants from a single country, Liberia.
“If you know anything about the government, you know how slowly it moves, and how difficult it is to get anything through the bureaucracy,” said Sarah Pierce, an MPI analyst and co-author of “Dismantling and Reconstructing the U.S. Immigration System,” a study that examined scores of Trump revisions. “It’s a testimony to how determined they were. … They pushed boundaries wherever they could.”
The administration’s genius, she said, was ensuring that each slight alteration built upon and reinforced others. For example, in 2018 the State Department revised its consular manual, empowering officers to limit the amount of time that nonimmigrant visas, such as those issued to students and tourists, would be valid. As a result, visa-holders must apply for renewals more often. That more frequently subjects them to other changes that have toughened the vetting of foreign nationals.
The White House referred Inquirer questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond. The agency that administers the blank-space policy, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said it does not comment on matters under litigation.
“I think the president wanted to make the process of immigration legal and fair,” said Lou Barletta, a Trump supporter who took a hard-line immigration position both as a congressman and the mayor of Hazleton and who has been mentioned as a future GOP candidate for Pennsylvania governor. “He’s pro legal immigration.”
Even detractors concede the president, as promised, delivered one of the most activist immigration agendas ever, transforming the goals and direction of the system across government agencies.
“The Trump presidency will have lasting effects on the U.S. immigration system long after his time in office,” MPI said in its study, deeming it “unlikely that a future administration will have the political will and resources to undo all of these changes at anywhere near a similar pace.”
For instance, MPI found:
› In 2017, the State Department mandated any visa applicant who officers decide “warrants additional scrutiny” must provide 15 years of information on travel, housing and employment.
› In 2018, a new regulation sped the destruction of green cards, employment authorizations or other documents returned to USCIS because of a mailing problem. Previously the agency held on to the papers for a year. That was cut to 60 days.
› In 2018, the administration ended “Deferred Enforced Departure,” which currently provides protection from deportation for only one nationality, Liberians. As many as 3,600 could face removal in January. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used never-before-implemented powers of a 1996 law to levy fines of up to $799 a day on immigrants who remain in the country after a removal order.
› In 2020, USCIS sought to raise fees for many immigration and naturalization benefits, in some cases doubling or even tripling them. The application to become a naturalized citizen, for instance, would increase more than 80%, from $620 to $1,160. In September, a federal judge blocked the changes, at least temporarily.
It was in October 2019 that USCIS began rejecting forms that included blank spaces.
Instead of leaving empty spaces on I-589 forms, used to apply for asylum, applicants are supposed to write “none,” “not applicable” or “unknown.” In actuality, forms that didn’t specifically use “N/A” were rejected, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
AILA studied the rejection of 189 of the forms and found that all were turned back because of blank spaces.