Immigrants are growing nervous after two rounds of President Trump’s immigration orders, which have created uncertainty and have prompted an uptick in green card applications, and left immigration lawyers struggling to keep up with the changing legal landscape.
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The rapid succession of orders under Trump — one in January, followed by a second one in March that was a response to a successful court challenge of the first — has left lawyers scrambling to keep up with the changes.
“There was whiplash,” Elizabeth Quinn, an immigration lawyer at Maggio-Kattar in Washington, told the Washington Examiner.
“I was trying to describe it to clients, when it wasn’t really clear,” she said of the first order. “The fact that it was immediate — never in my whole career I’ve said so many times ‘I don’t know.'”
Trump’s first order temporarily banned entry into the United States of people from seven majority-Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — and went into effect immediately and created havoc for those trying to process travelers. In response to a successful legal challenge, Trump’s second order scrapped language that favored Christian refugees over Muslims, and removed Iraq from the list of countries facing a temporary travel ban.
The new order also doesn’t ban green card holders and permanent residents from entering the U.S., a prohibition that led to confusion and protests when the first order was released.
Even with those corrections, some lawyers, like Becki Young, the co-founder of Hammond Young Immigration Law in D.C., say the pace of change under Trump has been unprecedented. “Just in the past week there have been four major developments in immigration law. Normally we get that once a quarter.”
Paul Virtue, a partner at Mayer Brown in D.C., called it a “major fire drill.”
His firm was part of many involved in pro-bono representation of travelers stuck at Dulles International Airport in the aftermath of the first executive order. Protests erupted at Dulles and other international airports nationwide following the first order, as airport officials were unsure how to implement it with travelers arriving from any of the barred countries.
As lawyers struggle to keep up, they also note a growing desire on the part of immigrants to get their green cards, in the hopes of avoiding snags in the future.
“There’s not that level of panic among clients now, but we’ve seen an uptick in people who want green cards or want to apply for naturalization of citizenship,” Quinn said. “People who really have no reason to fear are interested in getting that stability.”
Young said her firm is having five-to-ten more times as many consultations with individuals worried about their status as before, varying from people in the country legally to those here without documents.
Mohammed Syed of Syed Law Firm said he used to file “a couple” of green card to naturalization of citizenship petitions a month, but has seen those petitions triple since the election.
Syed has also seen an increase in the number of people coming to him with marriage-based petitions — for example, someone in the U.S. illegally marrying his or her partner who is here legally.
“It’s insecurity generally,” Syed explained, even for individuals who have nothing to worry about.
“They don’t want to take any chances,” Virtue told the Washington Examiner. “Especially after the initial confusion.”
