Photograph by Chris von Holle
What many natural-born citizens don’t understand about immigration is that it’s a process. Moving to America involves many bureaucratic steps including petitions, applications, interviews, fees, financial documents, affidavits of support, medical exams—and that’s just for one individual to get a visa. The entire process is confusing and exhausting, and the Trump administration is working to make things even more difficult for both immigrants and legal experts.
“All of our rules are built to keep people out,” says immigration attorney Christopher Pogue. “It’s just about finding exceptions to the overlapping rules and regulations that have been put into play since the Chinese Exclusion Act [of 1882]. Ever since, we’ve been sort of playing politics on who we want to exclude and who we want to make exceptions for.”
Most immigrants fit into one of three categories: employment, family, and humanitarian. Each pathway requires paperwork and fees that can add up, especially for people who bring their families. Then there are the waiting periods.
“Last I looked, the adjudication timeframes [for humanitarian visas] are over 30 months. It was six months before [the second Trump administration],” says Pogue. “Take someone who’s been a domestic violence victim, who’s been cooperating with police and looking for a pathway to legalize their status. Now, processing that can be 47 months just to get a receipt notice and filing your case takes about six to eight months. It’s mixing immigration and politics and they’re choosing winners and losers.”
This waiting period proves deadly for many on the humanitarian path. “Less than five percent of refugees are being resettled every year. More than 90 percent are going to die in a refugee camp,” says Mayra Casas Jackson, executive director of the Immigrant & Refugee Law Center.
According to Jackson, refugees are told by the United Nations which country they’ll be settling in. If selected to go to the U.S., the country then takes over and decides which city the refugee will go to, giving them no choice in the matter. If they get assigned to the tri-state area, they’ll come through resettlement agencies like Catholic Charities Southwestern Ohio and Kentucky Refugee Ministries. Even though refugee resettlement is an international endeavor, the U.S. government has still found a way to make it near-impossible to achieve citizenship.
“In November of 2025, this administration announced that they were halting all green card processing for refugees and asylees who came from January 2021 to February 2025 to ‘re-review’ their cases,” says Jackson. “Then in March this year, this administration announced that if a refugee hasn’t applied and obtained their green cards, they’re going to be incarcerated. Our clients are living in total fear.” Editor’s note: As of June 5, a federal judge has struck down the freeze on refugee and asylum applications on the grounds of having no legal basis, being arbitrary and capricious, and committing unlawful bigotry.
Then there are the migrants who arrive at the border seeking asylum (completely legal, and according to U.S. law, not punishable by detention). Most immigrants take this path due to desperation, dire circumstances, and a lack of resources to take the “proper” channels. “When you’re poor, there’s no legal way to immigrate to the U.S.,” says Jackson. “Can you imagine the courage it takes to walk thousands of miles and once you arrive to the U.S.—if you’re lucky enough to get asylum—that means you can never go back to your home country?”
“I think people are simply looking for clear, reasonable rules that will be enforced in a clear, reasonable way,” says Pogue. “I think that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is stuck with a large bureaucracy and a lot of the tools to make it work better have been purposefully taken away.”
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