Since February, the Trump administration has been touting a $5 million visa to wealthy foreigners to get into the United States with lofty promises of an immediate rollout. Aboard Air Force One in April, President Donald Trump flashed a laminated, golden prototype to reporters and announced that it would become available “in about less than two weeks,” while the White House launched a website in June to sign people up to join a waiting list.

But in reality, any Trump gold visas are a long way off — if they can ever be implemented at all.

Trump and his aides have repeatedly exaggerated the likelihood that such a program can be implemented under current law, and they have made no effort to introduce legislation to make it happen. Immigration attorneys and other legal experts say a president has no power to unilaterally create a new visa category, which would require an act of Congress.

The gold card visa exemplifies a striking contrast in the Trump administration’s immigration stance, which is focused primarily on championing aggressive restrictions and deportations while proposing a fast track for the ultra-wealthy. Critics have argued that the proposal would turn access to the U.S. into a commodity for sale and reflects a transactional approach to immigration out of step with American values.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is leading the rollout, has suggested that the gold card visa would replace an investor visa — called EB-5 — that has a long queue. But any effort to give wealthy people a visa ahead of people who have been waiting in line is bound to lead to legal challenges, attorneys say.

Doug Rand, senior adviser to the former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Joe Biden, said that no administration has changed visa eligibility criteria since the 1990 law that formed today’s green card and temporary visa categories.

“There’s no lawful basis to do this, and if they do it anyway, they’re going to get sued, and they’re almost certainly going to lose,” Rand said.

In response to questions about the future of the visa program, Commerce Department spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer said in a statement that “Secretary Lutnick is determined to follow through on President Trump’s vision to create a Gold Card visa program that will raise unprecedented revenues for the United States.”

The White House and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

The Supreme Court has established that Congress has “plenary power” over immigration and has suggested in multiple instances that Congress has supremacy over the executive branch in establishing immigration policy, said George Fishman, senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration.

However, Fishman added that in one 1950 decision, the court also said that “when Congress prescribes a procedure concerning the admissibility of aliens, it is not dealing alone with a legislative power. It is implementing an inherent executive power.” The decision also didn’t specifically say the executive branch could act without congressional authorization.

“I’m very dubious it can be done without an act of Congress,” Fishman said.

Congress hasn’t changed visa categories in 35 years and has at times pushed back when previous administrations took steps that they thought impeded their powers. Republicans in Congress argued that the executive branch had overstepped its authority when President Barack Obama sought to give legal status to children brought to the U.S. and when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas expanded parole programs without congressional approval under Biden.

“It would be hard to reconcile those views with the ability of the administration to create a new green card,” Fishman said.

Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh said the current Republican-held Congress is especially resistant to creating pathways for residency or citizenship. Nowrasteh was a witness at a June 25 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, “Restoring Integrity and Security to the Visa Process,” where the gold card didn’t come up and Republicans called for further scrutiny of the existing visa process.

“There’s zero appetite for people in Congress to consider this right now,” Nowrasteh said.

The legality issues have led to immigration attorneys warning clients to steer clear of the gold card.

Philadelphia-based immigration attorney Ron Klasko said he has had some clients from Canada and Europe express interest in the visa, but he has told them there is little use in even signing up for the waiting list until the path becomes clearer.

“Why would I want to do that before I know if it’s a law, what the law says, what the requirements are, what information the form is going to ask me for, what documents I have to produce, what the terms and conditions are,” Klasko said.

Klasko also warned that more needs to be done to clarify how these wealthy people would be taxed under this new form of residency.

Buffalo-based immigration attorney Rosanna Berardi said she was among the tens of thousands who have signed up on the website to learn more. However, she was dubious that any more would come from signing up after the administration has not provided clarity on the plan for creating a new visa category. She added that the White House has also not specified whether this would be a new visa category or replace an existing visa for foreign investors who create jobs.

“This administration keeps forgetting that the executive branch doesn’t make the law,” Berardi said.

Lutnick’s comments have offered some lofty ideas of what the gold card program could look like.

In a March interview on the All-In podcast, he said that the funds raised by sales would pay off the country’s $1.3 trillion annual deficit, or about 260,000 visa sales. He also said that eventually the program could effectively pay off the entirety of the U.S. debt, more than $36 trillion, meaning more than 7 million people would need to sign up for visas.

He told the Financial Times in mid-June that 70,000 people have signed up to learn more about the card.

Lutnick has said the idea for the gold card came from hedge fund manager John Paulson, who spoke with Trump and Lutnick about the project. Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service played a key role in organizing that effort, including standing up a website that advertises “The Trump Card Is Coming,” according to records obtained by The Washington Post and a Department of Homeland Security official familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions. The website instructs visitors to enter their name, email address and region to “be notified the moment access opens.”

In mid-April, DOGE representatives Edward Coristine and Marko Elez asked employees at DHS and the State Department to quickly set up a system that would pass gold card visa applicants’ data among different parts of DHS, the records show. The data that would be transferred was sensitive, detailing applicants’ names, birth dates, places of residence and other personal information, the records show.

The DHS team finished setting up its requested data transfer pipeline in less than a week, the employee said, then settled in to wait for applicants. But as of late June, not a single application had come along on a webpage for the visa application, which isn’t public, the employee said.

Lutnick told Axios in late May that the website would roll out in a week, and details about the visas would come out “over a matter of the next weeks; not months, weeks.”

Around the world, other countries that had once offered similar costly green cards have reversed course after controversies over granting rich people unfettered residency and the fallout from that, said Kate Hooper, a senior policy analyst for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. For instance, Spain ended its golden visa after an explosion in housing prices fueled by wealthy buyers.

“There’s been a bit of a backlash to that … the optics of selling citizenship and worries about due diligence,” Hooper said.

Hooper, who studies the gold visa programs globally, said the U.S. proposal would be the most expensive one out there if it were feasible. Wealthy foreigners who want to spend less could easily acquire a visa to several Caribbean island nations for a fraction of the cost Trump has proposed. For instance, Antigua and Barbuda requires a contribution of $230,000 to a national development fund for a visa.

It is also unclear how many people would be interested in pursuing a U.S. gold card. EB-5 visas, which require investments of either $800,000 or $1.05 million, creating at least 10 jobs, are allocated to 10,000 foreigners a year.

The UBS Global Wealth Report for this year estimated many of the world’s millionaires already live in the U.S., and there may be about 33.5 million people outside of the U.S. with at least $1 million. (The report didn’t specify how many of those foreign millionaires might already have legal access to the U.S. and how many have more than $5 million.)