The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has significantly curtailed the maximum validity period of employment authorisation documents (EADs) for a wide range of foreign nationals, including refugees, asylees and those with pending adjustment-of-status applications, in the latest escalation of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.
Effective immediately for certain categories and from December 5, 2025 for others, the maximum validity of initial and renewal EADs has been reduced from up to five years to just 18 months for refugees, asylees, individuals granted withholding of removal, and applicants awaiting green-card adjudication.
For parolees (including those admitted under refugee or entrepreneur programmes) and beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status, work permits will now be limited to one year or the duration of their authorised stay, whichever is shorter.
A USCIS statement justified the measures on national security grounds, declaring that “reduced maximum validity periods will result in more frequent vetting of aliens who apply for authorisation to work in the United States”. The agency cited a recent attack on National Guard personnel in Washington as reinforcing the need for heightened scrutiny.
Joseph Edlow, acting director of USCIS, said the shorter validity periods would ensure that individuals authorised to work “do not threaten public safety or promote harmful anti-American ideologies”.
The announcement follows Monday’s directive ordering a blanket freeze on all asylum adjudications and the suspension of most immigration benefit applications from nationals of 19 countries deemed high-risk. USCIS has also begun reopening thousands of previously approved cases involving entrants from those countries since January 2021 for renewed security screening, with mandatory in-person interviews in many instances.
Separately, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters on Thursday that the administration intends to expand the current travel-ban list from 19 to more than 30 countries. Ms Noem, speaking after a meeting with President Donald Trump, said she had recommended a comprehensive ban on nations she accused of “flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies”.
Immigration lawyers described the across-the-board asylum freeze as unprecedented, noting that even applicants from low-risk countries have been affected. Routine processes such as replacement green cards and travel-document requests for nationals of the restricted countries have also been suspended.
The measures mark the most sweeping internal restrictions on legal immigration pathways in decades and are expected to create significant backlogs and uncertainty for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals already in the US on valid humanitarian or parole programmes.
