Kathleen Morriss and Falko König married in 2019 in Texas, then Morriss applied for a spousal visa for her new husband, who returned to Brazil to wait. Some of those memos directed immigration officials to implement higher fees, intensive vetting, and longer forms that made it increasingly difficult to apply and ballooned wait times. The wait times on foreign-spouse visas increased substantially, too. After Trump, processing times increased to as much as 15 months, said Dan Kowalski, an immigration attorney and scholar based in Colorado. In the pursuit of curbing legal immigration, the Trump administration directed United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to focus on fraud among immigrant and non-immigrant applications.

Source: Los Angeles Times December 15, 2020 13:02 UTC