Coalition Condemns USCIS Memo Threatening Family Separation and Forced International Travel for Green Card Applicants
COLORADO’S KEEP FAMILIES TOGETHER COALITION CONDEMNS USCIS MEMO THREATENING FAMILY SEPARATION AND FORCED INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL FOR GREEN CARD APPLICANTS.
Colorado’s Keep Families Together coalition strongly condemns the recent USCIS memorandum that may require certain green card applicants to leave the country to continue their applications. This policy risks disrupting the lives and livelihoods of international students, tourists, individuals on certain temporary work visas, humanitarian parolees, certain family members of U.S. citizens, and many others by forcing them to bear burdensome travel requirements, including the potential emotional, developmental, and social toll of separation from dependents or other loved ones.
Adjusting status to lawful permanent residency can be a long and complicated process. Previous, longstanding policy often allowed individuals to apply from within the United States, better ensuring that families could stay together and maintain stability in their daily lives and responsibilities. Under this new guidance, the administration is sowing more confusion, fear, and instability across families and communities while undermining fundamental principles of fairness, civic integration, and family unity in our immigration system.
At a time when millions of families already face uncertainty and severe backlogs in the immigration process, this policy threatens to further separate loved ones, disrupt employment, jeopardize livelihoods, and expose applicants to other ill-effects of prolonged delays and potential bars. Rather than modernizing and humanizing the immigration system, USCIS is implementing an unjustifiably punitive strategy against those seeking lawful adjustment of status that will not enhance our immigration system or otherwise benefit Coloradans.
We call on the Trump Administration to immediately rescind this memorandum and reaffirm pathways that allow eligible applicants to pursue permanent residency without being forced into unnecessary and harmful departures from the United States.
“Making adjustment of status procedures and other lawful immigration pathways harder for Coloradans defies our nation’s humanitarian values and jeopardizes the tremendous economic and cultural contributions of so many immigrants. This new process is yet another method that this administration is using to separate families, create confusion, and place immigrants in a no-win situation.” -Paula Schriefer, President & CEO of Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning.
“This policy change is yet another attack on immigrants in this country and creates additional barriers in an immigration system that already offers far too few pathways for families to remain together. Forcing people to leave the United States while trying to adjust their status will create unnecessary suffering, deepen family separation, and destabilize communities. It also undermines the innovation, talent, and economic contributions that immigrants bring to our country every day. It is deeply hypocritical for this administration to claim people should pursue immigration ‘the right way’ while simultaneously creating intentional obstacles for those doing exactly that. This policy further exposes the racist and exclusionary nature of this administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.” -Judith Marquez, Keep Families Together Campaign Manager.
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The Keep Families Together (KFT) is a partnership of Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, American Friends Service Committee Colorado, Casa de Paz, Colorado People’s Alliance, Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, and Spring Institute for Intercultural Learning. Supported by The Colorado Health Foundation and the Newcomers Fund, KFT formed in late 2024 to help protect Coloradans from the harmful impacts of ongoing and emerging anti-immigrant federal initiatives.
