Trump’s team has halved legalized migrant inflows in 2026 while blocking nearly all illegal migration, prompting lawsuits from progressives and business groups.
Breitbart reported that the State Department issued just 26,000 immigrant visas in February, compared with an average of 52,000 a month in the years before President Donald Trump took office. Those visas grant green cards and legal permanent resident status.
Trump’s deputies did it through regulations, not new statutes. They made it all but impossible to immigrate from 91 countries and cut the number of immigrant visas available in another 61, while the Department of Homeland Security drove illegal crossings toward zero.
Africa and the Middle East took the hardest hit. Immigration from Muslim-majority countries plunged by more than 90 percent. Progressives and business groups that cheered record green-card totals under President Joe Biden are now filing lawsuits to reverse the slowdown.
Vice President JD Vance has been blunt about the goal. On CBS on Sunday, he framed the cuts as a defense of shared community, not a blanket rejection of newcomers.
Vance told CBS:
"My goal here is to make it so that we can have a country with some baseline of social cohesion and sense of community. Because what happens when too many people come to the United States, even if they’re very good people...., it changes the country in very profound ways."
He pressed the point with a neighborhood example many working Americans already recognize.
"I have neighbors, I have friends of mine, who literally don’t know a single person in their neighborhood who speaks the language they do. Now, that’s not a criticism of anybody, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for an American citizen to want to share their community with people they have something in common with, and I think our immigration system has to build that."
Vance has also argued that mass migration lets investors hold down salaries and grow profits while skirting the harder work of training and high-tech productivity. In his telling, uncontrolled inflows corrode civic culture. The administration’s legal and illegal crackdowns move in the same direction: fewer arrivals, more room for Americans already here to rebuild common ground.
In 2024, Biden’s staff granted permanent residence cards to a record 1.35 million legalized migrants. The 1990 immigration law had long set a normal pace of roughly one million green cards a year, about one legalized immigrant for every four American births.
That record year is the contrast voters now see. Trump’s deputies did not wait for a logjammed Congress. They used existing regulatory authority to cut the pipeline in half for 2026 and keep the border sealed at the same time.
The administration has not released fuller migration data beyond the spring of 2026. The February visa total and the country-by-country limits already show the scale of the shift.
David Bier, tied to Cato’s funders, objects that the legal reductions outrun the illegal ones. His complaint underlines how broad the Trump approach has been.
Bier said:
"Illegal entries are down under Trump, but he’s cut legal immigration even more than illegal immigration."
He went further:
"President Trump has cut every type of legal immigration. He has reduced immigrant visas by 50%, mainly for spouses, minor children, and parents of US citizens and green card holders but also employment-based immigrants and others. Again, no new laws, just a lawless presidency."
Bier’s “lawless” label is the language of the open-borders side. The administration acted inside existing authority after Congress failed to rewrite the statutes. Spouses, minor children, parents, and employment-based categories all saw tighter processing. That is the policy choice Bier rejects and Vance defends on cohesion grounds.
Since January 2025, DHS deportations have reduced the foreign population by roughly 3 million illegal immigrants. The remaining illegal population stands at roughly 14 million. The country also holds about 28 million legal immigrants alongside roughly 290 million Americans.
Visa programs still allow employers to keep more than 2 million foreign contract workers, most of them brought in by Fortune 500 firms. Tighter oversight of those programs has not yet cut the roughly 2.5 million legal contract-worker population. The big drops so far are in permanent immigrant visas and in illegal entries and removals, not in the temporary contractor pool.
That split matters. Permanent settlement and illegal presence are down sharply. Corporate contract labor has barely moved. The lawsuits from the progressive-business alliance aim to reopen the permanent legal channel first.
Business-funded advocates and progressive groups backed the 2024 welcome mat and the record green-card year. They now describe Trump’s low-migration stance as intolerable and are heading to court to revive higher legal inflows.
The administration’s bet is plain from the numbers and from Vance’s CBS remarks: baseline social cohesion comes before investor demand for cheaper labor and before activist pressure for higher permanent arrivals. Regulations already locked in the 91-country near-ban and the 61-country reductions. Deportations have removed millions. Illegal crossings have collapsed.
What remains is whether judges will force the old volume back onto a public that voted for control of both the border and the legal pipeline.
American communities asked for a country that still feels like a country. The White House is delivering the pause they were promised.
