# USCIS **U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)** is the component of the [[Department of Homeland Security]] that administers the *legal* immigration system — the benefits side, as opposed to the enforcement side run by [[ICE]] and [[CBP]]. It adjudicates green cards and adjustment of status, naturalization, employment authorization, asylum and refugee applications, and the family- and employment-based petition system. Largely fee-funded, it processes millions of applications a year and is the agency most Americans and immigrants actually interact with when navigating lawful status. Created in the 2003 DHS reorganization, it inherited the service functions of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. For the KB, USCIS is where **restrictionist policy is implemented administratively** — not through dramatic raids but through processing decisions, fee increases, eligibility tightening, and the slow or hard "no." Because so much immigration outcome is determined at the adjudication level, control of USCIS is a quiet but powerful lever: the same statutes can yield a generous or a punitive system depending on how the agency chooses to administer them. ## Leadership (2025–) **Joseph B. Edlow** — who previously served as USCIS Deputy Director for Policy and as the agency's Chief Counsel during the first Trump administration — returned as Director of USCIS in 2025. A restrictionist with deep agency experience, Edlow has steered USCIS toward tighter adjudication standards, expanded vetting, and a mission posture reoriented away from "customer service" toward enforcement and fraud detection. ## Major functions - **Adjustment of status and green cards** — permanent-residence adjudication. - **Naturalization** — citizenship applications and the civics/English testing regime. - **Asylum and refugee processing** — the affirmative-asylum and refugee-vetting pipelines, sharply restricted in the second term. - **Employment authorization** — work permits, including for asylum seekers and DACA recipients. - **Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate** — vetting and fraud enforcement, expanded under restrictionist leadership. ## The capture lens The [[Project 2025]] agenda and the [[Stephen Miller]]-directed immigration program use USCIS to restrict legal immigration administratively. The patterns the KB tracks: - **Mission-statement and posture shift** — reframing the agency away from facilitating benefits toward gatekeeping and enforcement. - **Eligibility tightening** — the public-charge rule, narrower asylum criteria, and heightened evidentiary standards. - **Fee increases and backlogs** — using cost and processing delay as de facto restriction. - **Vetting expansion** — enhanced screening, social-media review, and fraud-detection emphasis. ## See Also - [[ICE]] - [[CBP]] - [[Department of Homeland Security]] - [[Stephen Miller]] - [[Federal Agencies]]