The sweeping crackdown President Donald Trump declared last week after an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members is poised to radically curtail immigrants from legally entering and living in the United States, putting up roadblocks unparalleled in recent history.

Within a matter of days, the administration rolled out a series of far-reaching policy changes: pausing all asylum decisions for migrants currently in the United States; reviewing the green cards that allow people from 19 countries, mostly from the Middle East or Africa, to live and work permanently in the United States; reassessing the asylum approvals issued during the Biden administration; indefinitely halting immigration applications filed by Afghan nationals; and barring Afghans from entering the country.The new rules are poised to potentially upend the status of as many as 1.5 million migrants with pending asylum cases in the country, the more than 50,000 who gained asylum from the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration and untold more who had been hoping to seek refuge in the United States.

And Trump has hinted that further action could come as a result of the attack, floating the possibility of denaturalization, or stripping people of citizenship.

Taken together, the moves represent some of the most significant changes to immigration policy since he regained office on a platform of substantially curbing the number of people entering the United States and deporting record numbers of migrants.

It remains to be seen how the administration will conduct such large-scale reviews of people already living legally in the country, and the federal government cannot easily strip people of their status. But the threat that people could see their cases reopened provoked alarm in a wide array of migrant communities now grappling with the fallout.

“The U.S. government has never halted such a broad slice of the immigration system or devoted this level of resources to rechecking its own work,” said Sarah Pierce, a former Department of Homeland Security official who is now director of social policy at the center-left think tank Third Way.

While security reviews are responsible, Pierce said, “this isn’t a calibrated security response — it’s a sweeping disruption of the legal immigration system at a moment when the administration is looking for someone to blame.”

Amanda Baran, a former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration, said she had never heard of the agency pausing asylum requests wholesale in the way the president had ordered.

“This is blunt force in a way that I have not seen before,” she said.

GUARD SHOOTING

Administration officials said the measures were necessary in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting, pointing to the fact that the 29-year-old suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, entered the United States in 2021 under a program established by the Biden administration to give quick access to Afghan allies after the Taliban retook their country.

“The protection of this country and of the American people remains paramount, and the American people will not bear the cost of the prior administration’s reckless resettlement policies,” said Joe Edlow, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in a message posted on social media. “American safety is non negotiable.”

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America had already been on alert for months as federal officials slashed refugee numbers, rolled back temporary humanitarian programs and narrowed the path to asylum in immigration courts, immigration advocates and lawyers said.

Even before the National Guard shooting, migrants from the 19 countries subject to the president’s travel ban had been preparing for more stringent reviews of their green card applications after the Trump administration announced it planned to make it harder for them to get that form of approval and other kinds of immigration relief.

In Southern California, Ara Torosian, an evangelical pastor and Iranian refugee with U.S. citizenship, said he was worried about members of his congregation, including some who had already been detained after reporting to their asylum case check-ins in recent months.

“We don’t know what we should do, especially now,” said Torosian, who preaches at the Cornerstone Church in West Los Angeles. “So many people have become threats because of the actions of one person.”

Trump has said the pause on asylum requests will continue for a long period of time.

“We don’t want those people,” he told reporters on Sunday about those seeking asylum.

In a social media post last week, the president also threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized U.S. citizens “who undermine domestic tranquility.”

‘UNCERTAINTY’

Some immigration lawyers and advocates have cautioned against panic over the potential for sizable rollbacks for those who already have legal status, noting that green card holders, asylum grantees and other long-term legal residents have already had to undergo heavy vetting and meet high legal burdens to obtain forms of relief.

“Fortunately, this is a nation of laws, and the more status people have, the more rights people have,” said Ryan Costello, the policy director at the National Iranian American Council, which lobbies on behalf of Iranian Americans. “But it is certainly a time of a lot of uncertainty and concern in the community.”

Ahilan T. Arulanantham, a law professor with the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, said the administration would have to meet significant legal burdens for the review to result in people losing their green cards or citizenship, including winning rulings for each individual case in court hearings.

The pause on asylum requests filed inside the country, known as affirmative asylum applications, could affect as many of 1.5 million people who had pending applications with USCIS as of June, according to government data.

It’s unclear how USCIS will conduct a review of so many cases. In recent years, the agency has struggled to lower its backlog of cases, according to the DHS inspector general. Agency employees have already been tasked with carrying out other mandates issued by the administration, including processing in refugees from South Africa and considering new factors, like purported anti-Americanism, when considering people’s immigration requests.

SEPT. 11 ATTACKS

The last major government crackdown on a specific group of migrants in the wake of a violent incident came after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

At the time, the Bush administration created a program known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System that asked for new registration requirements for immigrants from mostly Middle Eastern countries. The program, which was widely criticized by immigrant advocacy and civil rights groups for being ineffective and unfairly targeting Muslims, was later disbanded during the Obama administration.

Concern over the new measures announced by the Trump administration are now reverberating in Afghan immigrant communities and beyond.

Nooristani Bahramuddin, 35, who previously worked as a security guard and interpreter at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, said he was finally approved last year for a special visa program for Afghans that worked with the U.S. government. He and his family arrived in Chicago last August and were issued green cards a few months later. His son has severe autism, and they’ve since relocated and found a school in Richmond, Virginia, that can support him. Now they fear that the little stability they’ve created will be upended.

“We are feeling so nervous, hearing that they are reprocessing and reinvestigating those who were issued green cards,” Bahramuddin said. “I am just trying to be a good person here, and to teach my children the same.”