Maryland Joins Lawsuit Challenging Trump Administration's Green Card Policy Changes

Maryland has joined a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's changes to United States green card policy, according to a report published on October 25, 2026 by The Sentinel, adding the state to the escalating legal fight over lawful permanent residency in President Donald Trump's second term.

The decision inserts one of the nation's most immigrant-dense states into litigation over how the federal government awards, processes and restricts green cards, the documents that confer lawful permanent resident status under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Maryland's state government sits in Annapolis, and the federal programs at issue are administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security overseen by Secretary Kristi Noem. The Department of Justice, led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is expected to lead the government's defense in court.

The stakes are considerable. The United States issues roughly one million new green cards in a typical fiscal year, and an estimated 13 million lawful permanent residents live in the country, according to Department of Homeland Security estimates. Applicants already inside the United States generally pursue adjustment of status through Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, which carries a $1,440 filing fee under the USCIS fee schedule that took effect in April 2024, while applicants abroad go through consular processing at posts including the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

Maryland's interest in the outcome is direct. About 15 percent of the state's residents — more than 900,000 people — are foreign-born, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, and the Washington metropolitan region, which takes in Maryland's suburban counties, is home to one of the largest Kenyan-born communities in the United States. More than 100,000 people born in Kenya live in the country overall, and the United States is the largest single source of the more than $4 billion in annual remittances that the Central Bank of Kenya records from the diaspora.

The Maryland attorney general's office joined the litigation on the state's behalf, according to the report, which did not name the officials involved. Challenges of this kind are ordinarily filed in federal district court, where state plaintiffs typically ask a judge to block enforcement of a contested policy while the case proceeds, relief that can extend nationwide depending on the scope of any order. Appeals would then move through the federal circuit courts and potentially to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The filing is the latest legal flashpoint over the administration's handling of permanent residency. Earlier in Trump's second term, which began with his inauguration in January 2025, a freeze on green card processing drew alarm from technology employers and immigration lawyers, and the courts have already handed down at least one ruling touching the Diversity Visa lottery, the program created under Section 203(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act that reserves up to 55,000 visas a year for nationals of countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, Kenya among them.

For Kenyan and other African applicants, the Maryland-backed challenge reaches every major route to permanent residency. Family-sponsored petitions filed by U.S. citizen and permanent resident relatives, employment-based categories such as EB-2 and EB-3 that anchor many Kenyan nurses, accountants and technology professionals, and the Diversity Visa lottery all operate inside annual numerical limits and the 7 percent per-country cap set by Section 202 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which is why policy shifts in Washington move quickly through the State Department's monthly Visa Bulletin and into interview queues at the consulate in Nairobi.

Unless a federal judge orders otherwise, the administration's revised rules remain binding on applicants while the litigation runs its course, meaning petitions continue to be filed and adjudicated under current procedures in the meantime.

Multistate coalitions of attorneys general have become the primary vehicle for states contesting the administration's immigration agenda, a pattern that has repeatedly pushed green card and visa disputes toward federal appellate benches on expedited schedules since January 2025. Institutions with deep roots in Maryland, among them Johns Hopkins University and its Baltimore hospital system, rank among the state's largest employers and draw heavily on foreign-born talent, including African professionals on employment-based tracks.

A request for a preliminary injunction would ordinarily be among the first major filings in the case, and any ruling on such a request — whether it pauses the green card changes or leaves them standing — would set the practical rules for applicants, including thousands of Kenyan nationals with petitions pending at USCIS service centers and at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, long before the litigation reaches a trial on the merits.