Introduction

For most of the modern history of the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), lawful permanent residence has functioned as a settled status. Adjudication was, in practical effect, terminal: once an applicant adjusted status under INA § 245, 8 U.S.C. § 1255, or was admitted as an immigrant abroad, the resulting green card was treated as a durable entitlement that could be undone only through narrow and well-defined procedures. Removal of a lawful permanent resident (“LPR”) was the exception, reserved for criminal grounds under INA § 237(a)(2), 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(2), or for limited fraud cases under INA § 237(a)(1)(A) read together with INA § 212(a)(6)(C).

That premise no longer describes how the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) operate in 2026. Over the past six months, the executive branch has assembled a coordinated apparatus for reopening LPR status after the fact, drawn from policy memoranda, presidential proclamations, an internal revetting unit at DHS, refugee-specific reverification programs, and a pending Supreme Court case that, if decided for the government, will convert international travel into an opportunity to strip status without conventional deportation proceedings. The pieces are familiar individually. The combination is new, and it represents a structural change in how permanent residence is administered in the United States.

This article maps the apparatus end to end. It identifies the policy instruments that have been issued, the legal mechanisms by which they are being applied, the populations most directly at risk, and the defensive considerations that immigration counsel should be working through with clients now, particularly clients from the post-Soviet states and other listed nationalities whose adjustments since January 2021 are within the express scope of the comprehensive re-review.

The DHS Revetting Unit

The New York Times reported on May 14, 2026, that DHS has stood up a new internal unit dedicated to revetting LPRs already inside the United States. According to data obtained by the Times, the unit has reviewed approximately 3,000 green cards to date, has more than 500 cases under active review, and has identified more than 50 LPRs as targets for removal proceedings. Roughly two percent of cases reviewed are being flagged as potentially deportable.

The unit itself is significant less for the raw numbers, which remain modest against a population of approximately 12.8 million LPRs, than for what it institutionalizes. Adjudication and enforcement, historically separated by both bureaucratic structure and statutory design, have been merged. USCIS adjudicators, with access to A-file content that was originally reviewed at the adjustment or immigrant-visa stage, are now feeding cases directly into an enforcement pipeline that produces Notices to Appear, Notices of Intent to Rescind, and, in selected matters, denaturalization referrals to the Department of Justice. See “The EOIR Purge: New Data Confirms Systematic Transformation of the Immigration Courts (April 2026 Update)”.

The USCIS Policy Foundation

The revetting unit operates against a formal policy scaffold built deliberately and over a period of months. The principal components are USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0194, two presidential proclamations restricting entry from designated countries, Operation PARRIS for refugee cases, and an enhanced FBI fingerprint vetting protocol effective in late April 2026.

A. PM-602-0194 and the Comprehensive Re-Review

USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0194, dated January 1, 2026 and styled “Hold and Review of USCIS Benefit Applications Filed by Aliens from Additional Countries of Concern,” directs agency staff to conduct a comprehensive re-review of approved benefit requests for nationals of designated high-risk countries whose cases were adjudicated on or after January 20, 2021. The cutoff date is not incidental. It coincides with the start of the Biden administration and frames the entire re-review as a corrective measure against what USCIS has publicly characterized as inadequate prior vetting.

The agency’s own statement of findings, issued on March 30, 2026, is unusually direct. USCIS asserts that prior screening and vetting measures were inadequate, that many applicants for naturalization and lawful permanent residence were not sufficiently vetted, that applications were approved and individuals were naturalized who should not have been, and that those gaps expose the United States to significant national security and public safety risks. That formulation matters because it is the substantive predicate the agency will cite to justify rescission, the issuance of a Notice to Appear, and, where the agency believes the threshold can be met, referral for denaturalization under 8 U.S.C. § 1451.

The re-review is described as case by case rather than as blanket revocation. The methodology, however, has three operational features that materially shift the burden onto the resident. First, cross-checks against expanded national security and criminal databases. Second, the possibility of being called back for a new in-person interview. Third, and most significant in practice, a re-allocation of the burden of proof: the resident is expected to demonstrate that he or she maintained the intent to reside permanently in the United States, with travel history and ties scrutinized against that burden.

B. Presidential Proclamations 10949 and 10998

Presidential Proclamation 10949 and Presidential Proclamation 10998, together, restrict entry from 39 designated countries that the executive branch has determined lack adequate screening and vetting information. The proclamations themselves carve out LPRs from the entry bans. The carveout is, however, narrower than it appears. The “inadequate vetting” findings that underlie the proclamations are the same findings USCIS is now invoking to justify post-admission re-review of people who are already here. The proclamations therefore operate as the predicate for the revetting initiative even though they do not, on their face, authorize removal of any LPR.

Counsel should be attentive to the country lists. The Russian Federation, Belarus, and several other post-Soviet states are within the scope. For asylees and refugees from those countries who adjusted to LPR status on or after January 20, 2021, both the proclamation framework and Operation PARRIS apply concurrently. See “USCIS Implements Enhanced FBI Background Vetting Effective April 27, 2026: What Applicants and Counsel Should Know”.

C. Operation PARRIS

Operation PARRIS, which stands for Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening, is a DHS initiative directed at refugees specifically. Initial reporting indicates a focus on thousands of refugee cases in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, many of which have not yet matured into adjustments under INA § 209, 8 U.S.C. § 1159. PARRIS appears to operate within the broader hold-and-review framework and contemplates additional background checks, reinterviews, and renewed review of the underlying refugee claim. For practitioners whose dockets include refugees from Somalia, Russia, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, PARRIS is the immediate operational concern.

D. Enhanced FBI Vetting Effective April 27, 2026

Effective April 27, 2026, USCIS officers have been directed to resubmit fingerprints already on file for any pending case where the FBI screening was completed before that date. Officers are instructed not to approve a case until the enhanced check clears. The resubmission is handled internally and requires no action from the applicant, but the operational effect is substantial: routine I-485, N-400, and I-751 adjudications now sit in extended re-vet posture, and a benefit that was on the brink of approval can be paused indefinitely while the new check runs.

The apparatus uses three distinct legal mechanisms, often in combination, to convert revetting findings into removal outcomes. Counsel should understand all three because the agency’s choice of mechanism dictates both the procedural rights available to the resident and the defensive posture that will be most effective.

A. Rescission Under INA § 246

The most conventional path is rescission of adjustment under INA § 246, 8 U.S.C. § 1256. Where USCIS, on re-review, concludes that the resident was not in fact eligible for adjustment at the time the application was granted, the agency may issue a Notice of Intent to Rescind. If the resident contests the rescission, the matter is referred to immigration court for adjudication before an immigration judge.

The five-year limitations period in INA § 246(a) remains a live defense. The statute provides that rescission proceedings must be commenced within five years of the date on which the person obtained adjustment. For adjustments granted in 2021 or 2022, the limitations window is already closing. The agency has accordingly been aggressive about characterizing concealment as an ongoing violation that tolls the period, or about pursuing the resident directly under INA § 240 rather than via § 246, both to avoid the limitations question and to access the broader removal grounds available in regular removal proceedings.

USCIS internal guidance reinforces the agency’s preference for § 240 over § 246: it states that in most cases the agency can and should place the person into removal proceedings with a Notice to Appear rather than rely on rescission alone. The practical consequence is that even where rescission would be time-barred or evidentially difficult, the agency may still pursue removal directly. See “Cancellation of Removal for Permanent Residents (LPR)”.

B. Removal Under INA § 240 With Misrepresentation Charges

When the resident is placed directly into INA § 240 proceedings, 8 U.S.C. § 1229a, the charges most commonly drawn from a re-review are the fraud or misrepresentation grounds under INA § 237(a)(1)(A), 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(A), incorporating by reference INA § 212(a)(6)(C), 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C). The agency must show that the resident was inadmissible at the time of admission as an LPR by reason of fraud or willful misrepresentation of a material fact.

Materiality is the recurring battleground. Under Kungys v. United States, 485 U.S. 759 (1988), and its progeny, a misrepresentation is material only if it has a natural tendency to influence the decisions of the adjudicating agency. In the revetting context, the agency tends to characterize omissions, particularly omissions on Form I-485 Question regarding membership in organizations, prior employment, or political affiliations, as material by definition. Counsel should be prepared to litigate materiality vigorously on a record-specific basis.

Willfulness is the second recurring battleground. The Board of Immigration Appeals has long held that “willful” requires knowledge of the falsity of the representation, not merely an inaccuracy. See Matter of Kai Hing Hui, 15 I&N Dec. 288 (BIA 1975). Translation issues, application-preparer errors, and the resident’s understanding of ambiguous questions are all legitimate avenues for rebutting willfulness. This is particularly important for clients who completed their adjustment applications with the assistance of a paralegal or notary who is not now reachable, which is common in the post-Soviet client population.

C. The Inadmissibility Shortcut: Blanche v. Lau

The most consequential structural change pending in the legal system is Blanche v. Lau, on which the Supreme Court heard oral argument on April 22, 2026. The case asks whether DHS may treat a returning LPR with an unproven criminal allegation as an applicant for admission via parole, and later, after a conviction is obtained, use that conviction to support inadmissibility charges in removal proceedings.

The factual background is straightforward. Muk Choi Lau became an LPR in 2007. In 2012, while a New Jersey trademark-counterfeiting charge was pending against him, he traveled abroad and returned through John F. Kennedy International Airport. Immigration officers at JFK declined to admit him as a returning resident and instead paroled him for deferred inspection. After Lau pleaded guilty, DHS commenced inadmissibility proceedings, alleging a crime involving moral turpitude under INA § 212(a)(2)(A)(i)(I). The Second Circuit held that the government lacked clear and convincing evidence at the time of reentry sufficient to treat Lau as seeking admission, and that, accordingly, he should have been admitted and could be removed, if at all, only through deportation proceedings under INA § 237.

The Solicitor General is asking the Supreme Court to reverse. The government’s position, advanced during oral argument by Assistant to the Solicitor General Sopan Joshi, is that parole functions as a pause button on LPR status, permitting DHS to defer the admissibility determination until after a conviction is obtained. The government acknowledges that this approach keeps the door open to inadmissibility-based removal in cases where deportability-based removal would be unavailable or harder to prove.

The stakes are not confined to the narrow class of returning LPRs with pending criminal allegations. A ruling for the government would authorize border officers to seize the green card and place an LPR’s status in indefinite legal limbo on the basis of the officer’s satisfaction, without a developed evidentiary record and without immediate judicial review. Amici filing in support of Lau observed that this would effectively convert lawful permanent residency into a precarious and revocable privilege whenever the resident travels.

Oral argument suggested a divided bench. The Chief Justice, along with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Barrett, expressed varying degrees of sympathy for the government’s position, particularly Justice Barrett’s observation that requiring clear and convincing evidence at the border would be impractical because a CBP officer cannot process witnesses or examine evidence at a port of entry. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson pressed the government on the absence of any articulated evidentiary standard, with Justice Kagan asking whether the government’s two prior answers had simply not sounded good enough.

A decision is expected by late June 2026. Counsel should be prepared for either outcome. If Lau prevails, the existing protections for returning LPRs are reaffirmed and the practical leverage of the parole-and-see approach is curtailed. If the government prevails, returning LPRs with any old, unresolved, or even dismissed criminal allegation become candidates for parole at the port of entry, and the burden of proving entitlement to admission will shift onto the resident.

Political Speech as a Removal Trigger: The Khalil Pivot

No discussion of the apparatus is complete without an examination of the matter of Mahmoud Khalil, which has produced both the most-watched LPR-removal litigation of the second Trump administration and a template that practitioners should expect to see replicated.

The procedural history is by now familiar. In March 2025, ICE detained Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian organizer, without a warrant and on the basis of a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under INA § 237(a)(4)(C), 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(C), that Khalil’s continued presence in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. The federal habeas litigation that followed produced a preliminary injunction from the District of New Jersey concluding that the foreign-policy ground, as applied to Khalil, was likely unconstitutional. On January 15, 2026, the Third Circuit, in a divided panel opinion, held that the district court lacked habeas jurisdiction over Khalil’s claims because Congress had channeled review of removal orders into the petition-for-review process under INA § 242(b)(9), 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9), the so-called zipper clause.

The procedural pivot that matters for the broader apparatus, however, was not the jurisdictional ruling. It was the government’s substantive shift. After the district court enjoined detention on the foreign-policy ground, DHS added a new charge under INA § 237(a)(1)(A) on the theory that Khalil had failed to disclose, on his green card application, prior employment with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the British Embassy in Beirut, as well as certain organizational affiliations. The immigration judge in Louisiana sustained the additional charge, and on April 9, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a final administrative order of removal. Khalil’s case is now pending before the Fifth Circuit on petition for review, while his habeas litigation continues in the Third Circuit.

The template embedded in this litigation is the practitioner’s point of attention. When the foreign-policy ground proved constitutionally vulnerable, the government did not abandon the matter. It pivoted to a misrepresentation theory grounded in the contents of the original green card application. Counsel representing clients with elevated public-profile risk should expect that the agency will mine I-485 and N-400 applications retrospectively for any omission that can be characterized as a willful concealment of a material fact. Prior NGO affiliations, employment with foreign embassies or international organizations, organizational memberships, and social-media history are all foreseeable targets.

The Khalil litigation also has direct doctrinal implications for the post-Soviet client population. Many residents from Russia, Belarus, and the Central Asian republics adjusted status with histories that include service in or affiliation with state or quasi-state entities, work for foreign embassies in third countries, or memberships in organizations that may be characterized retrospectively in ways the resident did not anticipate at the time of adjustment. Defensive practice now requires retrospective audits of those filings before any subsequent benefit application is submitted.

Practical Implications for Practitioners and Clients

The apparatus described above produces a set of concrete practice considerations that practitioners should be working through with every LPR client whose case profile presents any of the recognized risk factors.

A. International Travel Has Become a Risk-Bearing Decision

International travel by an LPR is no longer the routine event it was previously understood to be. Even before the Supreme Court rules in Blanche v. Lau, reported cases include LPRs who were detained at ports of entry on the basis of decade-old, dismissed criminal charges after routine European or Latin American travel. Counsel should be advising clients with any prior criminal contact, including charges that did not result in conviction and convictions that have been vacated or expunged, against unnecessary travel until the Lau decision issues and its implementation becomes clear.

For clients whose travel is unavoidable, counsel should consider applying for an advance parole document or, where appropriate, a Reentry Permit on Form I-131 before departure. While neither instrument can cure an inadmissibility ground that exists on the merits, both create a documented record that the client departed with the intention of returning to settled permanent residence and may be useful at the port of entry in resisting a parole-and-see disposition. See “Form I-131A, Application for Travel Document (Carrier Documentation)”.

B. Naturalization Has Become a Higher-Risk Decision

Filing Form N-400 reopens the entire A-file. Under PM-602-0194, that reopening now occurs against a backdrop of enhanced retrospective scrutiny rather than the ordinary good-moral-character inquiry contemplated by INA § 316, 8 U.S.C. § 1427. Counsel should not file N-400 for any LPR who adjusted on or after January 20, 2021 and who is a national of one of the 39 designated countries, or who has any of the elevated-risk attributes discussed above, without first conducting a thorough retrospective audit of the I-485 and any prior asylum, refugee, or nonimmigrant filings.

The audit should include, at minimum: review of all answers to the membership-and-affiliation questions on the I-485 and Form G-325 series; review of all travel history disclosures; review of any prior employment with foreign state entities, embassies, international organizations, or NGOs; review of any military or paramilitary service; and review of social-media history and any public statements that could be characterized as inconsistent with the answers given on the application. Where audit findings reveal genuine inconsistencies, counsel should evaluate whether to advise the client to defer naturalization, to file with an explanatory cover, or, in some cases, to pursue affirmative steps under available waiver provisions.

C. Post-Soviet Clients Are in a Particular Category of Risk

The post-Soviet client population is at the intersection of multiple risk factors. The Russian Federation is on the designated-country list. Many post-Soviet clients adjusted on the basis of asylum grants and so are within the express scope of Operation PARRIS-style refugee revetting. Documentation from the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period is frequently incomplete or inconsistent across different applications submitted over a span of years. Service in compulsory military programs, employment with state-affiliated enterprises in the 1990s, and memberships in youth organizations of the Soviet era are all common features of these files and are all foreseeable hooks for a misrepresentation charge if disclosure on the I-485 or N-400 was incomplete.

Counsel should treat every post-Soviet client who adjusted on or after January 20, 2021 as a potential revetting target and should conduct the audit described in subsection B prophylactically, even where no benefit application is currently pending. Where the audit identifies a substantive risk, counsel should consider documenting the client’s contemporaneous understanding of ambiguous application questions, retaining translations of original-language records where translation discrepancies are foreseeable, and preserving evidence of the application-preparation process that may rebut a willfulness charge later.

D. Litigation Posture for Counsel

When a Notice of Intent to Rescind or Notice to Appear arrives, the early procedural decisions are determinative. Counsel should consider, at the outset, whether to challenge the limitations period under INA § 246(a) by demanding agency proof of the rescission commencement date, whether the case is properly framed as one for rescission rather than removal in light of the agency’s own internal guidance preference for the latter, whether the underlying charges are sustainable on materiality and willfulness as a matter of statutory construction, and whether the conditions of any related detention support a habeas claim that survives the zipper-clause analysis from the Third Circuit’s Khalil decision.

Federal-court litigation strategy has also been complicated by the Khalil panel ruling. Habeas remains available for true conditions-of-confinement claims, but the line drawn by the Third Circuit treats challenges to the fact of detention as channelled through the petition-for-review process. Counsel litigating in habeas should be deliberate about framing claims that do not collapse into the merits of the removal order.

Conclusion

The instruments described in this article, taken individually, are not new. Rescission under INA § 246 has existed since 1952. Misrepresentation grounds under INA § 212(a)(6)(C) and INA § 237(a)(1)(A) have been the bread and butter of the agency for decades. Inadmissibility determinations for returning residents under INA § 101(a)(13)(C), 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(13)(C), are a familiar feature of port-of-entry practice. The foreign-policy removal ground under INA § 237(a)(4)(C) has been on the books since 1990. Refugee and asylum revetting under post-admission protocols has appeared episodically in prior administrations.

What is new in 2026 is the assembly. The Department of Homeland Security has connected the policy memoranda, the proclamations, the refugee-specific reverification program, the enhanced fingerprint protocol, the dedicated revetting unit, the inadmissibility theory under review at the Supreme Court, and the misrepresentation pivot perfected in the Khalil litigation into a single, coherent system for converting revetting findings into removal outcomes. The system is not directed primarily at LPRs with serious criminal histories; that population has always been removable under preexisting authorities. It is directed at LPRs whose status the agency has come to view as the product of inadequate prior adjudication, and at residents whose post-admission conduct, including speech, the agency views as inconsistent with the substantive prerequisites for permanent residence.

For practitioners, the immediate priority is the audit. For clients, the immediate priority is to understand that the green card is no longer the terminus of the immigration process; it has, for present purposes, become a status that can be reopened. Both counsel and client should plan accordingly.