The Trump administration has quietly built a dedicated team inside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to scrutinize the criminal records and fraud histories of lawful permanent residents, and to flag those who may be eligible for deportation. The unit, housed within USCIS's Tactical Operations Division and known internally as "LPR Operations," employs 40 immigration officers tasked with combing through green card holders' backgrounds, the Daily Mail reported.
The effort marks a significant expansion of the federal government's immigration enforcement posture beyond illegal immigrants and toward those who hold lawful status but may have obtained it through fraud or committed disqualifying crimes after receiving it.
Federal law already permits the deportation of green card holders for specific reasons, including convictions for certain crimes and fraudulently obtaining permanent resident status. What is new is the institutional machinery now dedicated to finding those cases and acting on them, a move that fits squarely within an administration that has made vetting and enforcement its signature domestic priority.
Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show the scope of the operation. As of May 7, LPR Operations had reviewed 2,890 cases. Eighty percent of those were deemed to require "no further action", meaning the green card holders in question passed muster.
That leaves a meaningful fraction that did not. More than 500 green card holders remain under active review, and tens of thousands more have been identified for future scrutiny.
USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler framed the initiative as part of a broader organizational shift. The agency, he said, is "evolving through organizational realignments to better protect American citizens and support our mission priorities."
"USCIS's first and foremost mission is to safeguard America by vigorous vetting and screening aliens. We will continue to implement changes as we identify opportunities to strengthen the US immigration system."
Kahler added that those being re-vetted include immigrants arrested and convicted of various crimes, as well as others USCIS determined had lied to obtain permanent resident status. One internal document cited a case involving a person "admitted to membership in an organization suspected of illegally or illicitly obtaining export-controlled information and technology for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard."
That detail alone suggests the review is not a bureaucratic exercise. If green card holders with ties to the IRGC slipped through prior vetting, the question is not whether USCIS should look again, it is why the review did not happen sooner.
Critics have raised a predictable objection: resources. USCIS had more than 11 million pending applications for various immigration benefits at the end of September. That number had roughly doubled since the end of 2019, a surge driven in large part by the crush of asylum claims and other filings that piled up during and after the Biden years.
Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS policy analyst now serving as director of special policy at the center-left think tank Third Way, questioned the allocation:
"There have been a lot of questions about whether or not this is a responsible use of USCIS's resources, especially when you consider how backlogged the agency is. I think the numbers only continue to raise those questions."
The argument has a surface logic. An agency drowning in 11 million pending applications might seem like the wrong place to stand up a new enforcement division. But the counterpoint is equally plain: a backlog created by years of loose enforcement and lax vetting is itself a reason to ensure that the people who did receive green cards actually deserved them.
An 80 percent clearance rate means most reviewed cases checked out. That is not a sign of a witch hunt. It is a sign of a system doing what any competent bureaucracy should do, auditing its own prior work. The 20 percent that did not clear, and the 500-plus cases still under review, represent real gaps that prior administrations either missed or chose not to examine.
The green card review unit fits within a much larger pattern. The Trump administration has pursued immigration enforcement on multiple fronts simultaneously, from the border to the courtroom to the federal workforce itself. The Department of Homeland Security has secured 80,000 voluntary departure orders as enforcement pressure mounts across the interior.
If a green card holder is flagged by LPR Operations and USCIS determines deportation eligibility, the immigrant typically has the chance to appear before an immigration judge who issues a decision on the case. The process is not summary removal. It runs through the existing legal framework, a framework that Congress created and that previous administrations simply declined to use with this level of rigor.
The administration has also moved to staff up for the legal battles that inevitably follow aggressive enforcement. The Department of Justice has offered signing bonuses as high as $25,000 to recruit lawyers for immigration and policy litigation nationwide, a signal that the White House expects pushback and intends to fight it.
On the legislative side, the administration secured a key win when President Trump signed a Homeland Security funding bill that ended a 76-day partial government shutdown and kept enforcement operations funded.
The green card review is not the only place the administration has turned its attention to fraud baked into federal systems. The Education Department recently blocked $60 million in fraudulent student loan applications using a new screening tool, a parallel example of an agency deploying targeted review to catch dishonesty that prior administrations tolerated or failed to detect.
The common thread is straightforward: if the federal government handed out benefits, status, or money without adequate checks, this administration intends to go back and verify the work. That principle applies whether the benefit is a student loan or a green card.
The broader immigration agenda has also included more constitutionally ambitious moves. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that the 14th Amendment does not grant automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrants. That order drew immediate legal challenges, including from the ACLU, and faces likely Supreme Court scrutiny. National Review noted that longstanding precedent, including United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) and Plyler v. Doe (1982), and federal statute 8 U.S.C. 1401 present formidable obstacles. Conservative legal commentator Andy McCarthy wrote that "the president may not unilaterally change an understanding of the law that has been in effect for decades under a duly enacted federal law."
The birthright citizenship order and the green card review operate on different legal terrain. The former attempts to change settled law by executive fiat and faces steep odds. The latter enforces existing law that Congress already wrote. Green card holders can be deported for fraud or qualifying criminal convictions, that is not a new interpretation. It is a decision to actually apply the statute.
The open questions are worth noting honestly. The exact date the Tactical Operations Division was created has not been publicly specified. The internal documents referenced by The New York Times have not been released in full. And the procedural steps between a flag by LPR Operations and a final deportation order, beyond the immigration judge hearing, remain only partially described in public reporting.
Those gaps matter. Any enforcement program that touches lawful residents' status must be transparent enough for the public to evaluate its fairness. Green card holders are not illegal immigrants. They went through a process, received approval, and built lives in this country on the strength of that approval. Reviewing their cases is legitimate. Doing so without clear procedural safeguards and public accountability would not be.
But the critics who frame this as an overreach have to reckon with the facts the review has already surfaced. A person linked to an organization suspected of funneling controlled technology to Iran's Revolutionary Guard held a green card. That is not a hypothetical. That is a failure of prior vetting that someone, eventually, had to catch.
The administration has also moved aggressively across agencies to roll back Biden-era regulatory actions and restructure federal enforcement priorities. The green card review fits that pattern, not as a departure from the rule of law, but as a return to enforcing it.
When 80 percent of cases come back clean and the other 20 percent include ties to the IRGC, the program is not a dragnet. It is an audit. And the people who should worry are the ones who lied to get in.
