Every year, the U.S. sets aside permanent resident cards, known as “green cards,” including 226,000 family-preference green cards for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, 140,000 employment-based green cards and 50,000 diversity green cards.
But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, plus the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, have slowed the processing of all green cards. And if they aren’t processed by the end of a fiscal year, these green cards — typically, tens of thousands of them — go unused and disappear.