The Throughline: Is Trump’s Gold Card an Immigration Golden Ticket?

This column typically talks a lot about the kinds of immigrants the Trump administration doesn’t like, so for a change, today we’re talking about immigrants the administration does like: immigrants with more money than sense.

That’s right, we’re talking about the Gold Card program, which was announced last fall and rolled out in December.

When President Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick started talking about the Gold Card, my brain short-circuited a little, and I was far from the only one. After all, I write “Only Congress has the ability to regulate legal immigration” often enough that I should probably have a keyword shortcut for it. The executive branch has a lot of discretion in immigration policy, but one thing it definitely can’t do is create a new visa program. But that’s exactly what it sounded like they were trying to do: launch a new immigrant visa with access to permanent residency, available to anyone who pays $1 million directly into the U.S. treasury.

So either the Gold Card program was a massive violation of black-and-white immigration law, or it was a total scam for press coverage and attention (and maybe even some donations from really big suck-ups) that wouldn’t result in any actual Gold Cards, green cards, or any cards at all.

Now that we know a little more about the program, it looks like it’s a bit of both: a real program of questionable legality, which is also, kind of, a sham.

The Gold Card is not in fact a new type of visa. Instead, what the administration did was issue an executive order declaring that donating $1 million to the U.S. Treasury should serve as evidence that a would-be immigrant was someone of “extraordinary ability” who would therefore qualify for an employment-based immigrant visa in the existing EB-1 category. The order also laid out that an applicant was also someone of “exceptional ability” who would therefore qualify for a national interest waiver under the EB-2 immigrant visa category. (The waiver is necessary because an EB-2 visa applicant is supposed to have a job offer, except in exceptional cases.) 

To be clear, U.S. regulations and a whole body of precedent cases spell out how decisions should be made about the definitions of each of these terms, and how to tell if someone meets that standard. For example, there is a list of 10 criteria for “extraordinary ability” in the EB-1 category (which was called the “Einstein visa” when it was created in 1990), and a successful applicant has to meet at least three. (The criteria are things like having scholarly articles published or works of art exhibited.) 

The Trump administration doesn’t say explicitly that the $1 million donation is supposed to override this entire system, and officials insist that of course each application will be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis. After paying up, would-be Gold Card holders receive a version of the application used for EB-1 and EB-2 petitions, called an I-140G. That’s submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, just like a normal I-140 for normal EB-1 or EB-2 applicants is.

But while submitting a normal EB-1 application requires evidence of how immigrants meet each of the regulatory criteria, the version of the application for Gold Card applicants just asks a lot of questions about where the money came from.

The real question, though, isn’t how these applications are being evaluated. It’s how quickly. 

The Gold Card website – whose URL is, I’m sorry to say, trumpcard.gov – promises adjudication in a matter of “weeks” and approval in “record time.” That attracted the notice of a group of people who had already applied for EB-1 or EB-2 visas, but were either stuck in a USCIS processing backlog or had to wait in what can seem like perpetual limbo – sometimes for years – for visas to become available for people from their country. (Because no more than 7% of visas can be given to any given country, China and India are constantly backlogged for EB-1s, and other countries – including Mexico – can face backlogs for EB-2s.) They sued, arguing that the administration was letting Gold Card applicants jump ahead of them in line.

The administration’s response to the lawsuit has been illuminating. Officials clarified that visa eligibility is still based on filing date – so, for example, Gold Card applicants from China or India wouldn’t be able to get visas ahead of people who had submitted their EB-1 applications earlier. Additionally, the response reveals that only a few dozen people have actually submitted applications – 165 people have successfully completed the first step (including the donation), and 59 of those people have submitted their I-140G forms, the Gold Card variant of the I-140. (Two weeks before the government submitted that evidence, Secretary Lutnick told Congress that one person had successfully received a visa under the program.) 

Based on these low numbers, they claim, there couldn’t be any significant displacement of existing EB-1 or EB-2 visa applicants. The administration even notes that none of the six staffers currently dedicated to I-140G applications had been pulled off the regular EB-1 or EB-2 caseload.

That certainly makes it seem like a stunt that doesn’t actually deliver the speed and certainty promised in exchange for the $1 million donation (which is, of course, nonrefundable if the application is denied). 

But I’m not so sure. This issue comes down to how USCIS is making decisions about how many employees should be processing a particular type of application.

The USCIS application backlog for both EB-1 applications and EB-2 national interest waivers has been growing for the last few years – as is the case with most types of immigration applications – but has been growing even faster since Trump arrived in office, as processing times have generally slowed (presumably due both to staff cuts and to the administration’s emphasis on time-consuming vetting of applications). As of September 2025 (the most recent data available), there were over 20,000 applications in the EB-1 backlog; the EB-2 backlog, meanwhile, had gotten bad enough that at current processing rates it would take over two years to clear. (In both cases, too, applications are much more likely to be denied when they finally are processed than under pre-Trump USCIS.) 

The administration points to the fact that there isn’t a shortage of EB visas, and therefore Gold Card applicants can’t be taking visas from other applicants. But the limiting factor here simply isn’t visa availability. It’s processing time. A visa may hypothetically be available for you even though visas are being given to other people, but if it takes months or years to process your case and it only takes weeks to process theirs, that hypothetical doesn’t mean much. 

The missing variable in the public data about backlogs is how many people there are processing a given type of application – which is to say, how much work USCIS is putting toward processing it. But a declaration the government submitted in this lawsuit filled in that gap: there are 275 USCIS employees on the standard EB-1 and EB-2 workload. Those people were responsible for processing nearly 170,000 petitions submitted in those categories in fiscal year 2025 (many of which, presumably, are still pending).

In other words, there is one processor  for every 609 EB-1 or EB-2 applications submitted through the normal process. There is one processor for every 10 Gold Card applications.

That isn’t a guarantee of skipping the line – but it’s darned close. 

Of course, putting the six Gold Card adjudicators on normal I-140 duty wouldn’t do much to fix that lopsided application-to-adjudicator ratio. But the whole situation is a reminder of just how crucial USCIS staffing is to determining how quickly a case can be resolved. Immigration itself is not in fact a zero-sum game in which some people have to lose for others to win – but USCIS processing is, and the administration is picking its own winners.