Crackdown turns to legal immigration

Since D.C. attack, official pathways toward citizenship also hit a roadblock.

- BY SUHAUNA HUSSAIN, ANDREA CASTILLO AND RACHEL URANGA

SOPHIA NYAZI

SOPHIA NYAZI is shown with her husband, Milad, an Afghan whose application for a green card is pending.

Sophia Nyazi’s husband, Milad, shook her awake at 8 a.m. “ICE is here,” he told her.

Three uniformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were downstairs at the family’s home on Long Island, N.Y., on Tuesday, according to a video reviewed by The Times that she captured from atop the staircase.

Nyazi said the agents asked whether her husband was applying for a green card. They told her they would have to detain him because of the shooting of two National Guard members a week earlier in Washington.

“He has nothing to do with that shooting,” Nyazi, 27, recalled answering. “We don’t even know that person.”

Her protests didn’t matter. The Trump administration has put into motion a broad and unprecedented set of policy changes aimed at substantially limiting legal immigration avenues, including for immigrants long considered the most vulnerable.

Milad Nyazi, 28, was detained because, like the man charged in the shooting which left one National Guard member dead, he is from Afghanistan.

The administration has paused decisions on all applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, by people seeking asylum. The visa and immigration applications of Afghans, whom the U.S. had welcomed in 2021 as it pulled all troops from the country, have been halted.

Officials also froze the processing of immigration cases of people from 19 countries the administration considers “high-risk” and will conduct case-by-case reviews of green cards and other immigration benefits given to people from those countries since then-President Biden took office in 2021.