Trump Removes the 'Permanent' From 'Perman...

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On Thanksgiving weekend in Washington, the script felt grimly familiar. After 9/11, Congress ordered a biometric “entry-exit” system for foreign visitors that never fully materialized but expanded fingerprinting and face scans at airports over the next two decades. In 2017, President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” sent protesters into airport terminals as families from a handful of Muslim-majority states were suddenly turned away.

Now, after a 29-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker allegedly ambushed two National Guard soldiers near the White House—killing Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and critically injuring Andrew Wolfe—Trump is turning a single atrocity into the launchpad for the most sweeping immigration clampdown of his second term. Green cards from 19 “countries of concern” are being reopened, Biden-era refugees are being called in for re-interviews, and every noncitizen, including long-settled green-card holders, is about to have their face scanned on the way in and out of the United States.

The politics are obvious. The deeper question—especially for the millions of immigrants caught in the net—is what kind of immigration system America is building in the name of security this time.

Why is this happening?

The trigger was the shooting a few blocks from the White House on November 27, when Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal allegedly opened fire on two West Virginia National Guard members, killing Beckstrom and leaving Wolfe in critical condition. Lakanwal arrived in 2021 under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome and was granted asylum earlier this year, a detail Trump has seized on to argue that Biden “imported” danger.

Within hours, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) froze all immigration requests involving Afghan nationals. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) then announced a sweeping review of all asylum cases approved under President Joe Biden and every green card issued to citizens of 19 “countries of concern,” a list that includes Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Haiti, Burma (Myanmar), Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow spelled out the approach on X, promising a “full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.” Reuters and the Associated Press report that about 200,000–233,000 refugees admitted between 2021 and early 2025 will have their cases reopened, with their green-card processing suspended while the review is underway. Trump has already slashed the refugee cap to around 7,500 a year and signaled a preference for white South African Afrikaners, emphasizing how ideological this reordering is.

The scale of potential disruption is huge. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics estimated there were 12.8 million green-card holders living in the U.S. as of January 1, 2024; many thousands are nationals of the 19 flagged countries, with long-settled jobs, mortgages and children in U.S. schools. Trump officials insist they are catching up with security lapses, arguing that Biden-era refugee admissions from “terror- and gang-prone countries” prioritized volume over vetting.

There is also a second hugely consequential change: the long-promised biometric entry-exit system is finally going universal. A DHS final rule titled “Collection of Biometric Data From Aliens Upon Entry to and Departure From the United States” takes effect on December 26, 2025. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will now photograph virtually all non-U.S. citizens—green card holders, students, tourists and refugees alike—whenever they cross the border, and may also collect fingerprints, iris scans and even DNA in some contexts.

Until now, biometric exit checks existed only in patchwork pilot programs at about 50 airports and a handful of land and sea ports, largely focused on certain visa holders. The new rule removes those limits and age exemptions, extending facial recognition to children and older travelers and empowering CBP to deny boarding or entry outright if a traveler refuses to be photographed.

National security officials see entry-exit biometrics as the missing piece in tracking visa overstays, which account for an estimated 42 percent of the roughly 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. Civil liberties groups see something closer to an automated suspicion machine, grafted onto an immigration system that is already hyper-politicized.

What is the Right saying?

On the right, the shooting is proof that Biden’s years in power were too porous. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has become the face of the crackdown, telling Newsweek and other outlets: “For four straight years, the Biden administration accelerated refugee admissions from terror- and gang-prone countries, prioritizing sheer numbers over rigorous vetting and strict adherence to legal requirements. This reckless approach undermined the integrity of our immigration system and jeopardized the safety and security of the American people.”

Joseph Edlow frames the green card review as simple law enforcement: “USCIS is ready to uphold the law and ensure the refugee program is not abused,” he wrote in the memo suspending green-card processing for Biden-era refugees. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called Trump’s vow to “permanently pause” migration from “Third World countries” “great news,” while Congressman Chip Roy touted his PAUSE Act as a legislative counterpart to halt most immigration until “real reforms” are passed.

What is the Left saying?

Critics see something darker: a White House using a lone gunman to launder long-standing ideological goals. Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, said that Trump’s promised “pause” is part of his “classic racist anti-immigration agenda,” warning that the language of “Third World countries” is a barely coded hierarchy of which migrants are deemed human enough to protect.

Investigative outlet WhoWhatWhy described Trump’s Thanksgiving message as “full white nationalist,” noting that a “permanent pause” on “Third World” migration in practice means blocking people from almost anywhere that isn’t majority-white, even as Trump makes carve-outs for white Afrikaners. Refugee advocates told the Associated Press that the retroactive review “would needlessly retraumatize refugees who have survived unimaginable horrors… and have just begun to rebuild their lives in the United States.”

Civil liberties groups are equally alarmed by the biometric dragnet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called CBP’s face-recognition program a “civil liberties disaster in the making,” arguing that error-prone algorithms and opaque watchlists risk entrenching discrimination against travelers of color. The ACLU warns that mass face recognition at airports and borders is “fundamentally a surveillance infrastructure” that can easily be repurposed far beyond immigration checks.

What happens next?

Legally, this is headed straight for the courts. Trump’s first-term travel bans survived only after multiple rewrites and a Supreme Court ruling that deferred heavily to presidential power over entry. A blanket “permanent pause” on migration from “Third World countries,” coupled with retroactive scrutiny of specific nationalities’ green cards, will invite fresh equal-protection and due-process challenges, especially from longtime residents who have built lives on the assumption their status was settled.

In the short term, the bigger impact may be uncertainty. Immigration agencies already face backlogs running into the millions; re-interviewing more than 200,000 refugees and reexamining all green-card holders from 19 countries will divert staff from everyday cases and could leave families in limbo for years. The biometric rule, by contrast, is likely to roll out regardless of courtroom fights, because both parties have, in practice, backed some form of entry-exit tracking since the 1990s.

What’s really being tested is not just how many faces CBP can scan, or how many files USCIS can reopen, but whether Americans are willing to normalize an immigration system in which law-abiding green-card holders from the “wrong” countries live under a permanent conditional asterisk. For now, the message from Washington is blunt: your status may say “permanent resident,” but in Trump’s America, permanence is whatever the next crisis allows him to redefine.

Once a core feature of Newsweek’s print edition, Perspectives distilled the week’s news into a chorus of standout quotes. Today, we’re relaunching Perspectives in a different format, but with the same mission of keeping our members informed by showcasing the views that shape the conversation.

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