Stephen Miller, the White House's immigration architect, is spearheading visa cuts that affect nearly all categories

The White House is moving forward with a review that affects, at every level, virtually every avenue of legal immigration to the United States. Diversity visas, refugees, family reunification, and employment-based sponsorship are all covered under a single regulatory framework that is being driven, to a large extent, by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the Trump administration's architect of immigration policy.

According to an analysis published by Forbes based on figures from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) from January 2026, it is projected that the Trump Administration's policies will reduce legal immigration to the United States by between 33% and 50%—between 1.5 and 2.4 million people—by the end of the president's four-year term.

Miller has held this position since the start of the second term of Trump, having served as a White House policy advisor during his first term, when he had already pushed for measures such as the travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries. Unlike that period, marked by legal battles that took months to resolve, the current plan is moving forward primarily through administrative channels via processing freezes, new regulatory standards, and internal guidelines that do not require congressional approval.

The scope, however, varies by category. A first set of measures already functions as a near-total shutdown. This is the case with the Diversity Visa program—which the administration had sought to eliminate through legislation during Trump's first term and which has now been halted without going through Congress— where nearly 55,000 cases remain pending, and those who do not receive their visa by September 30, 2026, will lose all rights arising from their selection, according to the timeline set by the Department of State. The then-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, had justified the suspension by citing the case of a shooter who had obtained permanent residency through that lottery years earlier.

The refugee program was likewise scaled back to a bare minimum. Washington lowered the annual quotas well below the 125,000 cap inherited from the Biden Administration and restricted admissions almost entirely, with the exception of white people from South Africa. The NFAP estimates that this cut will reduce the country's projected legal admissions by about 470,000 over four years, a figure that concerns economic analysts who believe the labor market will be affected.

According to another study by the NFAP itself, the Trump administration's immigration policies as a whole could cost the U.S. economy up to 102 million worker-years by 2035, and reduce the country's cumulative output of goods and services by $12.1 trillion by that same year.

A second set of measures targets specific countries of origin; while they have a significant scope, they do not amount to a total ban. A proclamation issued on December 16 blocks, to varying degrees, the entry of nationals from 39 countries—including Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Haiti. A month later, in 2026, the State Department expanded the suspension of immigrant visa processing to include another 75 countries, arguing that their citizens rely on public assistance "at unacceptable rates." Between these two lists, which partially overlap, there are 93 countries whose nationals accounted for 481,460 permanent residency grants in 2023, more than 200,000 of which were granted to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens.

A third set of measures does not directly block access but gives officials greater authority to deny applications on a case-by-case basis. The new "public charge" rule, published in July, allows them to deny permanent residency if they believe the applicant might rely on government benefits in the future, although in practice, family-sponsored immigrants do not typically access those benefits during their first few years in the country. Added to this are two regulations still in the proposal stage: one seeks to raise the minimum wage requirement for H-1B visas, and another aims to make the labor certification process that employers must complete more stringent.

The legal front is also active. Three class-action lawsuits filed by the law firm Red Eagle Law challenge various components of the plan in courts in California, with hearings scheduled for August 27 and September 21. In June, a federal judge had already struck down the USCIS policy of holding up and refusing to process applications from numerous countries and categories, including asylum, in the case Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS—a ruling the government appealed in July.

None of these legal proceedings, however, has so far derailed the timeline that Miller and the rest of the White House's immigration team set for the rest of the year. Between the September 30 deadline for the Diversity Visa and the hearings in August and September, the next month and a half will be crucial in determining how much of this plan remains in place and how much ends up being blocked in court.