I'm currently living in the US on TN status and am married to an American. Have you heard of anyone on TN status having difficulty applying for a green card? And do you have any sense of what the wait times currently are, particularly how long until you can get a travel authorization?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/us/trump-green-card-inter...
That was tolerated previously.
It does appear that these arrests have stopped since the NYT article was written.
They have a green card interview because they married an American. But you can’t get an adjustment of status if you are in violation of your current visa terms.
What’s happening here is that these people were here on tourist visas or completely illegally. Then at some point they married a U.S. citizen and filed a PERM application. But that filing doesn’t protect them from deportation for their original illegal status.
There's no PERM process in family based adjustment of status. You're confusing FB AOS with EB AOS.
Subsection (d) allows the attorney general to grant an AOS notwithstanding subsection (c) where an immigrant enters j to a bona fide marriage during proceedings regarding their immigration status. But under subsection (a) the AOS is entirely at the “discretion” of the Attorney General.
Indeed, section 1255 doesn’t grant anyone legal status. It contains various provisions where an AOS must be denied. Then, it allows but does not require the Attorney General to grant an AOS under other circumstances.
This is both right and wrong. Congress passed a law ages ago that grants forgiveness to overstaying spouses once the greencard is issued. The AOS process is allowed.
The hole however is the AOS does not extend your authorized stay if you were out of status when it was filed. So this leaves one vulnerable to the ICE arrests.
However, your AOS can still be processed even when arrested because of the forgiveness granted by law, so it just becomes an issue of having a good lawyer to get a judge to intervene.
Subsection (a) allows the “Attorney General, in his discretion” to grant an adjustment of status.
Subsection (c) categorically denies adjustment of status under certain conditions, including where someone has violated the terms of their visa. This takes away the Attorney General’s discretion to grant an adjustment. The adjustment must be denied.
Subsection (e) then makes subsection (c) inapplicable where the immigrant enters into a bona fide marriage during a legal proceeding regarding their immigrant status. It’s not correct to call this a “forgiveness,” because it doesn’t guarantee you any sort of legal status. Instead, it takes away what would otherwise be a categorical bar against an adjustment of status. That puts you back under subsection (a), where the decision is made by the “Attorney General, in his discretion.” The law says the Attorney can grant you the adjustment of status, not that he must. Under the law, the Attorney General can still categorically deny any adjustments under those circumstances.