These couples fell in love. Now immigration has them in limbo

Updated Sept. 1, 2026, 4:32 p.m. ET

Nicholas Miller hasn’t tried Taco Bell. Or Whataburger. Not because they are hard to find; they are everywhere in Austin. He is saving them for Irina Miller, his wife, for when her green card clears and she crosses the border for the first time.

Until then, he goes to work at a clinic, comes home, and avoids the rest of town. “I’m being a recluse,” he jokes.

“There are so many places I’m just avoiding so we can try it together for the first time because I don’t want to just be a tour guide,” Nicholas said. “I want to also experience that together.”

But almost a year since they filed the petition, Irina’s spousal green card application is all but stalled, the couple said in a video interview with USA TODAY.

Expanding deportations and the country’s immigration enforcement apparatus was a key part of President Donald Trump‘s 2024 campaign. But top officials have also broadened restrictions for legal immigration pathways. Fewer immigration petitions are being approved, federal data shows, and they are taking longer than typical timelines, leaving couples and families in limbo.

USA TODAY spoke with several couples, most on the condition of anonymity fearing it could jeopardize their immigration cases, who described an arduous process taking an emotional and financial toll. Experts said current policies have made it harder for people to obtain visas and green cards.

“I was prepared to wait for a long time. But it was much easier when I knew that the time was shrinking and that every day, I was getting closer to approval. Now I don’t have that. And I haven’t had that for months,” Irina said. “I’m waiting and I’m waiting and it’s not getting any shorter. Weeks go by. Months go by.”

The Millers aren’t alone in rearranging their lives around a stalled piece of paper. One person in Oregon spends nights on the phone with her wife in Canada. Another has taken on four jobs in Japan to cover the cost of keeping up with flying back and forth. Others include a man in Michigan picking movies to watch on Netflix with his wife in England.

None of these couples thought that the long distance would be this long-term. All described a backlogged green card process that has led to uncertainty and confusion.

New federal data shows the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 46% fewer immigration petitions during January-March 2026 compared to a year ago, the fifth straight quarter of decline in the second Trump administration.

While employment and humanitarian-based approvals fell from the start, family-based approvals increased for most of 2025, peaking at 300,000 between July and September.

However, the latest numbers, encompassing January-March 2026, show family petition approvals, which include spousal green cards, dropped to 180,000, the lowest level during the new administration.

Beyond fewer approvals, processing times for green card petitions for immediate relatives, like spouses, have slowed down. At the start of 2026, it took the agency 12.5 months to evaluate a case, according to the USCIS quarterly data. The government portal now shows between 24 months and 52.5 months, depending on where it is processed. And this is just the first part of a multi-stage process.

The agency typically processes immediate relative petitions for green cards from abroad roughly in the order they are received. But since February, its progress has halted, said Leo Rossignac-Milon, the co-founder of Track My Visa, a third-party service that monitors applications for 25,000 users.

“It’s normal for processing time to shift as USCIS is adjusting their processes or their resource allocation. They’re dealing with a ton of forms but obviously this is a pretty lengthy slowdown, and the community members are really starting to worry,” Rossignac-Milon said.

USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said properly vetting people “requires a rigorous process,” and the agency is committed to reducing case backlogs through “a deliberate, data-driven, and risk-informed approach that strengthens both efficiency and the integrity of the nation’s legal immigration system.”

“By using new technology and smarter processes, we can focus on stopping criminals, fraud, and abuse, and make sure we apply the law as Congress intended,” Kahler said in an email statement.

Some couples have a particularly unclear path to what will happen to their petition. Earlier this year, the Trump administration put an indefinite “pause” on immigrant visas from 75 countries, including Russia, Irina’s home country.

A judge recently struck down that policy, but the administration then paused U.S. embassy and consulate interviews for immigrant visas around the world as the Department of State launched a global training for a new applicant screening policy.

The Department of State did not comment on the timeline to resume interviews when reached by USA TODAY. NBC News reported on Aug. 27 that an official not authorized to speak publicly said the pause is not expected to last beyond early to mid-September.

‘New hoops to jump through’

Amber, a biology tutor at a community college born in Washington, DC, married Jonathan from Argentina in early 2025, a relationship that began in 2018 on the language learning platform Conversation Exchange, where they struck up their first conversation.

If not for the slowdown, the couple would likely have already heard back about their petition filed a year and a half ago, but they are still waiting.

Amber said that the delays feel “purposeful,” adding: “It always seems like they’re coming up with new hoops to jump through.”

Sharvari Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said timely adjudication, the process of reviewing and evaluating cases, is critical for monitoring exactly who’s trying to enter the country.

Applicants provide their names, addresses, fingerprints and other information, making it easier for the government to identify them, said Dalal-Dheini, who worked at USCIS from 2008 to 2019. The alternative is “scaring people from applying and having them go underground, then you have no idea who they are.”

“It’s not helpful for them to have all that information and just sit on it for two years,” Dalal-Dheini said.

About 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration issues, a 10-point drop from spring 2025, according to a late July poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Approval among independents has dropped 8 points to 29%.

In Texas, a 34-year-old customer service worker waits to reunite with her spouse. She met her husband, a Japanese citizen, on a language learning app in 2024. At the time, he worked as a translator in Mexico.

Since applying for his green card, her husband moved back to Japan as the wait time for a consular interview was shorter there. But that made it harder for them to visit each other. They now have a 14-hour time zone difference. In addition to his main job at an elementary school, he picked up shifts cleaning hotels and other odd jobs.

“When my husband used to work in Mexico, he only worked one job. Now that he returned to Japan, he works like four jobs,” she said. “Main job on weekdays and then three other part-time jobs on the weekends just to make enough money to fly to the U.S. to see me.”

Overnight FaceTime calls

When a catering delivery driver from Calgary changed her dating app location to Vancouver in her “last-ditch attempt” of meeting someone, she matched a coin and antiquities dealer from Oregon who was visiting her family in Washington.

The two were smitten quickly, the driver said. Soon, long phone calls replaced podcasts on the driver’s route. The next month, she flew to Oregon. They went for walks by the cold and windy beach. The self-described “hopeless romantic” proposed a day before flying back to Canada.

“I watched a lot of ‘90 Day Fiancé’ and I always was like ‘I would never, it would be so difficult,’” the delivery driver said. “Look at me now.”

The coin dealer filed a petition for her wife in late 2025. While she said the application was straightforward, “paranoia” seeps in when thinking about what will happen to their petition.

Until they can reunite, the coin dealer and the delivery driver call each other as much as they can.

“We literally go to sleep with each other. We wake up with each other,” the delivery driver said, adding that she was a loud snorer before her surgery, so she would often mute her microphone.