USCIS’s Turn Toward Enforcement: What It Means for Your Green Card, Work Permit, and Interview

Transcript:

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: For more than two decades, USCIS has been the federal agency primarily responsible for administering immigration benefits. When the former INS was dissolved in 2003, the government intentionally separated immigration benefits adjudication from immigration enforcement, creating three distinct agencies, USCIS, ICE, and CBP. Under the Trump administration, we’re seeing a significant shift in the structure USCIS is taking on with a much more active role in immigration enforcement. We’re seeing expanded arrest authority for designated officers, increased issuance of notices to appear, greater coordination with ICE, more aggressive fraud investigations, and heightened scrutiny of immigration applications. In many ways, the line between immigration benefits adjudication and immigration enforcement is becoming increasingly blurred. And for those of us who practice immigration law, as well as the employers and individuals navigating this system, these changes raise some important questions.

What does this mean for the way USCIS officers are reviewing our applications? How might this affect the adjudication process? And what should applicants and employers be doing differently? That’s exactly what we’re going to explore today with our friend, Douglas Pearce, a former USCIS supervisor, who brings a very unique perspective on how the agency operates from the inside.

Doug, thank you so much for joining us, and I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all of these developments today.

Douglas S. Pierce: Awesome. Well, thank you for the nice welcome, and I’m happy to be here, Gabriella. Always interested in sharing my perspective from my time with USCIS- Yeah and this, and, the history that we all went through in that process, so.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: Yeah. So, so Doug, walk me through this. What happened here? What’s, what, what is happening? Where, when did the shift occur? What was the impetus behind all this?

Douglas S. Pierce: Well, I think to be fair, the shift in some ways has been taking place for a long time. I mean, it’s not just the current administration. I think things have accelerated under the current administration, and particularly in the last, year and a half or so. But shortly after, USCIS was created, out of, you know, the refuse or the parts that were INS, they, you know, realized that they, you know, when they took out all the investigative functions out of the adjudications, you know, that became, you know, USCIS, they discovered they, that, that there’s still issues of fraud. There’s still issues where we needed to be vigilant about people trying to game the system and that sort of thing.

Okay. And when, when you took all of the investigative resources and you moved them over into ICE or other, other agencies, they said, “Well, we still need to have the ability at, as an agency, the ability as an agency to look into these issues of fraud.” Now, they did it in a way that these were, FDNS was created, so that was a part of USCIS, and the goal of creating FDNS, the Fraud Detection and National Security unit was to, have a part of the agency that could look into issues administratively identify trends, coordinate with law enforcement agencies in ways so that the individual adjudicator didn’t necessarily have to reach out to ICE or the FBI. But they could hand the case off to FDNS, say, “Hey, we need more information from this other law enforcement agency. Can you be the interface?” So FDNS became, like, the interface between the adjudications of benefits and the identifying of potential fraud and issues like that.

So, that started way back in the day, and over time, the FDNS unit has continued to grow. It started out in Detroit. Like, we had one FDNS officer and, for the entire district. And then it became two, and then, then there was, you know, it started to become a whole unit of people. And soon it was a unit that rivaled the size of any adjudicative team that we had in the Detroit office, and they were kept busy.

I mean, there’s a lot of stuff to look at. There’s a lot of interfacing to be done, because what USCIS does touches on a lot of tangential law enforcement possibilities, right? They have, you know, adjudicators have access to, to any number of systems that are managed by law enforcement that they use for background checks and other types of things. So, so FDNS was a very integral part, but they were unarmed. They, and while they did do home visits and site visits and stuff like that in tracking down information, they didn’t carry firearms even when they went into dodgy neighborhoods.

And sometimes, you know, in particular situations, or when the situation warranted it, they might be accompanied by an investigator who was armed from ICE so that they weren’t in any, you know, were in less physical danger if there was a, if the situation went sideways.

And so, so, that, that change, you know, happened shortly after USCIS was created, and the age, FDNS portion of the agency continued to grow and develop as- USCIS have started depending more and more on background checks and the results of those background checks, so, but clearly things have accelerated this year. In, in the past year for certain.

And it’s ch- it’s been starting to change in, in, in cultural ways, it’s been changing in active ways, when they announce the new position of the, you know, homeland defender versus hiring more immigration services officers. I mean, when you are hiring new employees, coming in to do the job traditionally done by immigration service officers, and you’re telling them, “Your position is not a service officer, you’re a homeland defender.

You are defending our homeland by the decisions you make,” that changes the mindset of the people who are willing to apply for such a job, and the, and the people coming in, and the, and the tenor of the training perhaps. Right. I don’t know for certain, ’cause I haven’t been a part of any of that training, so I don’t know if it’s changed in any substantive ways from the train, from the training provided to immigration service officers. You know, one can assume that there’s at least been a cultural change in how it’s viewed.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: For sure. Of course. How could it not be? Yeah, exactly and just to be, to be clear, it, it appeared that this all really started coming to a head in October 2025 with the final rule, which was called the Codification of Certain USCIS Law Enforcement Authorities, which now allowed USCIS to make arrests for immigration violations and criminal offenses, to execute search warrants and serving arrest warrants, to carry firearms, participating in investigations, just as you said, and to exercise authorized law enforcement powers, including the use of force under applicable standards.

So yes, of course it’s different. Now, one of the things I wanted to talk about, the stats were pretty alarming on this. You know, years ago I had an I, under the This was now under the Biden administration, the early Biden administration. I had former USCIS officers say, you don’t have to worry about notices to appear. We, we rarely ever execute those.” but interestingly, by the end of 2025, USCIS had issued more than 196,000 notices to appear just in that year.

Walk us through what is a notice to appear, and what should we do if we have some kind of complicated nuance to our immigration history, do differently now that these notices to appear are becoming more prevalent?

Douglas S. Pierce: So yes, notices to appear, I mean, it was 0 it’s been an option for USCIS to issue them for, for a long time. But the agency was in a position that there, that we would only issue them in, especially like during, say, the Biden administration, and before that, say, the Obama administration NTAs were only issued in circumstances where there was, a fraud finding, during the decision that the case was based on, and that person had no other no other standing in the United States.

Or if it was statutory, like if an I-751 is denied, this, the law says that a notice to appear will be issued.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: And, and to be clear, a notice to appear is a document not putting you in removal proceedings, but indicating that you need to go before an immigration judge to discuss your immigration status and what comes next.

Douglas S. Pierce: Right, and it’s the beginning of the removal proceedings. you know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the notice for, to, to appear in front of an immigration judge and explain your status and explain why, you know, the, the government shouldn’t put you in removal proceedings.

And so most NTAs probably result in person being in, placed in removal proceedings and having to have a series of hearings to go before immigration judges and justify their status or, or seek relief from whatever, issue they may have.

so in, you know, before I retired, so in May of 2025, the USCIS had already been in a position where, we were told, “Okay, if you can issue an NTA, if it can be justified in any way, go ahead and do so.” so if a pers- if we denied a I-45 adjustment of status and the person didn’t have a valid non-immigrant status, we would issue the NTA.

If, there was a finding of fraud, of course there would be an NTA. If a 751 was denied, that was an NTA, and if there was, any, any indications that a person may have obtained their immigration status through fraud, then we would issue NTAs as well. And so that started early, you know, early in 2025, and it continued to build up until the change came in, in October of 2025, and, and I imagine that it’s been full-bore since.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: Yeah. Yeah. And this kind of, this, this ties similarly into my next topic, which I think a lot of people are wanting to hear your perspective on, which is the influx of ICE in the adjudicatory setting of USCIS, specifically in marriage-based context, where somebody has a precarious immigration status. They may have entered legally, but they maybe overstayed their status prior to applying for the I-485 or they worked without authorization.

And it was happening earlier this year in a wave of offices across, not all, but some offices across the US, where they would get to the point of the adjudication where they realized that this, this overstay, which is technically allowed under the immigration laws, has become problematic from ICE’s perspective, and an ICE officer is waiting behind the scenes to come out and arrest them. Walk us through that, what you And walk us through if you are aware of, if you’ve heard anything on the street from your former colleagues of the extent that this practice is still happening.

Douglas S. Pierce: Well, I can’t really speak to whether it’s still happening, but I could, there’s certain assumptions we can make. And so, I mean, throughout my career, there were always the possibility that some interviews would involve law enforcement at the end, to be involved. Sometimes if there were background checks, hits that somebody had an active warrant, or if there were concerns about the safety of the officer conducting the interview based on what we knew.

And sometimes it was not just the, the a- it was not the applicant, but maybe the petitioner, you know? It, you know, could have been a US citizen petitioner who was, who had an active warrant or other issue. So law enforcement could get called upon to be available or to step in, or to conduct the arrest, depending on the details of the warrant. You know, it depends on what the, the agency that wanted somebody arrested, you know, had detailed in their warrant.

And so, we, you know, FDNS would often reach out to, it, before an interview would take place and see what, you know, the agency that issued the warrant wanted to take place. But in addition to that, I think what this current administration has opened up the possibility to is, you know, just some overstays or some, you know, if, just having someone who can petition for you and you could be eligible for status, if you had overstayed long enough or if you’d committed certain acts in the United States it wasn’t enough necessarily to prevent an arrest from taking place.

And so ICE would, you know, ICE or other law enforcement agencies could be available to execute an arrest if, if that was warranted. And, so it’s, it all depended on the circumstances and facts of each individual case. I don’t think there’s any, there’s no blanket policy like everybody who’s out of status is gonna be, you know, have somebody show up and arrest them. I think it’s more of, of individual circumstances for those particular cases, and maybe what the resources were available in those particular areas, you know?

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: Yeah. And it, yeah, you know, it seems from what I’ve heard to have decreased the amount of this activity happening, of somebody who was in overstay, applied for a green card based on marriage to a US citizen, that they are not being taken into ICE custody. I’ve had several successful cases of involving, involving overstay that have been approved without incident, so I’m pleased to see that. But it is the, again, a chilling effect that h- Has endured for individuals scared for their lives when they walk into a USCIS setting.

Douglas S. Pierce: Yeah, I think the, the possibility of, you know, of an arrest or the possibility of facing some sort of law enforcement action is intimidating to some people, right? And it could change whether they’re willing to, follow through on applications or petitions that they’ve filed. It could change the calculus in their mind of whether or not, they wish to pursue that. And, you know, by all, by, by all seeming intents of the political leadership of this country, that kind of intimidation factor is something that they want.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: Yeah, for sure. And so I guess my, to wrap up all of these changes, from your perspective as a former USCIS supervisor, which of the populations of individuals do you think should be most concerned about these changes, or will be most heavily impacted? What kind of fact patterns would a USCIS adjudicator look for these days to determine whether these extra powers need to be exercised?

Douglas S. Pierce:  So, I mean, I think anybody who’s got, multiple encounters with law enforcement needs to, to consider how those actions will be seen, what were the consequences of those encounters, what were the outcomes. so anyone, you know, if the more law enforcement encounters a person has, the more they need to consider, their options, I suppose.

I hesitate to say that there’s any one population, but I mean, obviously the longer that somebody’s been here and out of status perhaps the more they have to be you know, concerned about. And then, those who come I mean, there’s certain things that are kind of obvious. I mean, the United States is pretty close to at war with Iran, right? And so, you know, I’ve had a couple of individuals that I’ve talked to who were from Iran and were pursuing various benefits and I kind of just said, “Okay, do you understand things have been tense between the United States and Iran for a long, long time?” But now there’s, like, missiles flying, and there’s bombs going off, and there’s and it’s an active state, where any of their past involvement with, that would show or hint at to a USCIS officer or to other law enforcement that you had ongoing connections with the Iranian state, their military or the IRGC, that’s gonna be problematic. And I think, of course, anybody who’s got ties to any group or organization that is now thought of as a, as a terrorist organization.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: Well, this leads to the next question I was going to ask you, which is, we obviously this government has come down quite hard on Hamas. and I’m not making a statement as to whether or not that’s justified at all, but where I’ve seen that become a topic of conversation is you have students who are, we might- we’ve seen stories about this in the news, pro-Palestinian protesters, who are green card holders, who are now applying for naturalization, or who are in the middle of the adjustment process, and who are now getting arrested at their interviews or encountering, encountering difficulty with wrapping their case up, because of this, protestation.

So would your advice be to anybody that has engaged publicly in pro-Palestine protests or through online social media posting to either think twice about proceeding with their immigration process or, potentially be prepared for an uphill battle? Where is the threshold? Is it, you know, putting a few free Palestine stories on Instagram versus showing you, standing in line at a protest? Where, where is the line here?

Douglas S. Pierce: Yeah. So I mean, the Palestinian issue is super complicated. you know, you gotta remember with, with Gaza, it is being so tied up with, you know, it’s been ruled by Hamas for, for ages, and, you know, where, you know And Hamas is an active terrorist organization, but they also ran civil services in, in Gaza. They provide humanitarian aid, you know, they distribute humanitarian aid to the population.

And so bear in mind that, you know, in a group such as that, their financing is tied up in all of the things, all the money or whatever that goes into Gaza to support people. and so, just step back, look at it. I mean, it’s hard when, when you feel so strongly about what’s going on in particular places.

But after the October 7th attacks and, you know, on Israel by the Hamas organization, you know, Israel was, you know, had right of self-defense and, and there was a terrible tragedy. So many people died. And, but, and so the challenge with offering any kind of support towards the Palestinian cause is it’s so wrapped up in the potential to be supporting terrorist organizations.

Even though you personally might just support the suffering that the Palestinian people have gone through, that suffering has been tied to, you know, the organization that’s creating a lot of that. So there’s just so much, to be So I, I would, you know, if you have anything that’s, and where you’ve been publicly supportive of Palestine and the Palestinian people, be mindful that that’s gonna come to the attention and, and that’s gonna show up in background checks, and that’s gonna.

They will know. And, you know, as I, I mean, it depends on how deep do some people go into social media, that sort of stuff. but there’s, you know, there’s, they definitely have ways of finding things out, and so.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.:  Even if your profile’s set to private, even if it’s on a story that was published, they still have access to it?

Douglas S. Pierce: If you put stuff on the internet, nothing’s really private, right? You could think it’s private, but it’s not. Yeah especially because other people can share it, other people could, you know, so your name could be tied to something, you know? And so just be mindful. It’s not, I mean, you know, social media works like a network. And so, like, you could be friends with somebody who is, you know, h- you know, tied to somebody who’s an activist, and things could get, you know, misconstrued. So just be mindful that it’s a touchy time, and social media is, could be more dangerous than you think, so.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.:  Hmm. Yeah. Unfortunately, there seems to not be a bright line rule there. There’s, there’s a- Best thing to remember, don’t do anything, but one or 2 posts as opposed to daily posts might be treated a little bit differently, but investigated potentially either way.

Douglas S. Pierce: Could be. And, and, you know, you might have to talk to somebody about it, and you- you know, and that’s, now, that could be good, could be bad. it all depends on what comes of those conversations, so.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.:  Okay. Any other last-minute thoughts on this, this trend of, this movement of USCIS becoming more like law enforcement? Any lasting nuggets of wisdom you want to share with everybody?

Douglas S. Pierce: Well, I think, you know, one of the things that I’ve been doing this month is watching USCIS’s public website, you know, watching the news alerts that they put out, the- Right the news releases. They’re almost all focused right now on investigations and arrests. Not so much on achievements or oath ceremonies or celebrating, you know, successes of a, of a benefits agency that’s, you know, working hard. It’s all focused on, you know, how well they’re doing to protect the homeland and how they’re cooperating with other law enforcement agencies in doing so. And so that, that change in public focus and the statements made by the director, Edlow, you know, in terms of, hey, USCIS is a law enforcement organization.

This year they seem to be following through and, and becoming much more public and, you know, openly stating that this is what they’re about. And, you know, I have thoughts, and I share them when I can. and so it’s, I, you know, I, I dedicated my life to USCIS and, and promoting citizenship and, you know, the American dream and hoping, helping to make it possible for so many people, and it’s- It’s challenging to watch, you know, the agency go down this path towards, towards more of a law enforcement mindset.

You know, I think when it comes down to it, there are differing timescales between, a benefits adjudication agency and a law enforcement agency, right? So law enforcement agencies, if they say they’re doing an investigation, those investigations take as long as they take. They’re You know, whereas a benefits adjudication agency is, you know, is ideally, you know, supposed to work towards an efficient adjudication of those benefits.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.:  And we’ve certainly- And- seen the result of that in m- our naturalization cases are taking longer than they ever have. Granted, there’s more being filed than ever before, but, you know-

Douglas S. Pierce: Actually, not so much. the numbers I saw didn’t look like there were more being filed, just the backlogs are building up quicker because they’re adjudicating fewer of them per month, many fewer than they are receiving. So so I think, Yeah well, it feels that.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.:  It feels that way to us. We’re getting more naturalization calls than ever before since the Trump administration started, ’cause we have a lot of green card holders who are quite scared about their status. But interesting that that may not be the case, that they are getting more statistically than they have in the past.

Douglas S. Pierce: Right. Yeah, so my look at the numbers, it seems like they’re g- they’re receiving fewer, per month. Interesting and but the backlogs are building. You know, they doubled in the last year, at least on naturalization applications. Yeah, so it went from 6.something months per, per processing time to about 12.7 right now on average across the agency.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.:  A lot of my cases are pending for 14 months now, 15 months, and growing. So we’ll see. You know, to end, to end things on a positive note, what are the things, you know, despite these changes to law enforcement being, taking more of a priority now, based on my conversations with you, based on the way my clients are still being treated at USCIS offices, there’s still good people working for these agencies that do care about the people that they serve, and are trying to do the job the way they’ve always done it, which is, you know, with respect for their clients and wanting to make a smooth process once they get to that interview stage and get through those final steps. And you would still agree with that, it seems, right?

Douglas S. Pierce: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely, so.

Gabriella Agostinelli, Esq.: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Doug, for joining us. Thank you for everyone listening in. I wish you all a wonderful day. And until next time, we’ll be talking with ya. Thanks, guys.

Douglas S. Pierce: All right. Thanks, Gabriella. Nice chatting with you. Take care.