A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has started rolling out digital infrastructure for a new golden visa immigration program, according to sources familiar with the matter, public records, and tests conducted by WIRED. The White House has yet to formally announce the initiative, but some US permanent residents and foreign visitors are already being asked if they have applied for a “Trump Card Visa.”
President Donald Trump first floated the idea of creating a $5 million golden visa in February, describing it as a way for wealthy individuals to buy residency in the United States and a pathway to becoming US citizens. How this would work is unclear: Federal law dictates how many permanent residency cards can be issued each year and who can get them, and experts say Congress would need to pass new legislation to raise the cap or change eligibility rules.
DOGE’s involvement in the visa project shows how quickly Musk and his team have expanded their purview. Trump’s initial executive order creating DOGE tasked the group with boosting government productivity by “modernizing federal technology and software.” Less than four months later, DOGE appears to be playing a central role in shaping the American immigration system.
Representatives from DOGE have spent the past several weeks coordinating on the golden visa program with officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the State Department, and other agencies, according to sources with knowledge of the meetings. On Musk’s side, the project is being overseen by two high-profile DOGE associates, Marko Elez and Edward Coristine.
One focus area for Musk’s team has been figuring out how to plug current US government systems for verifying travelers and processing immigration applications into what may eventually become a stand-alone website designed specifically for the Trump Card Visa. In late March, DOGE registered the domain trumpcard.gov, according to public records published by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Tests conducted by WIRED show the website has subdomains corresponding to a number of federal agencies and systems, including CBP, the State Department, and the USCIS Electronic Immigration System, the main portal for processing visa paperwork. The subdomains indicate that trumpcard.gov has been connected to digital infrastructure across multiple parts of the federal government.
A reference to the Trump Card Visa has also been added in the live application form for Global Entry, a program run by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that allows preapproved US citizens, green card holders, and travelers from certain countries to enter the US through a fast lane, saving them time at the airport. People who apply for Global Entry with a foreign passport are currently given the option to select if they have “submitted an application for a Trump Card Visa,” tests by WIRED show.
WIRED confirmed that citizens of China, Russia, Ukraine, South Korea, and many other countries are eligible to select the Trump Card Visa option in their Global Entry applications. It appears that only Canadian nationals are excluded; they are directed instead to the existing NEXUS program for prescreened travelers from the US and Canada to speed through customs processing.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
During a podcast appearance in March, Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, claimed he had already sold 1,000 gold cards. He noted that Trump had estimated they could sell 1 million overall. The idea, Lutnick told the hosts of the All In show, was to allow people to purchase the right to live in the United States and pay taxes only on their income earned in the country.
One of the hosts, Chamath Palihapitiya, relayed a conversation he said he had with Musk about the project: “One of the most difficult parts of it, is, it turns out, all of the CPB infrastructure to do all these checks, it’s like a lot of COBOL mainframes and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten.”
The White House hasn’t clarified whether it believes current immigration law provides the president statutory authority for creating the Trump Card Visa. “It’s not clear what the legal basis is, unless they do something such as have Congress pass a bill through both houses and the president signs it, which is called legislation,” says Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank focused on trade and immigration issues.
The current system for issuing permanent residency cards, known as green cards, is governed by laws such as the Immigration Act of 1990, which outline in detail who is eligible to receive green cards and in what numbers. A key aspect of the regulation is that no more than 7 percent of green cards can be given annually to immigrants from any single country.
| Got a Tip? |
|---|
| Are you a current or former government employee who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal at louise_matsakis.83 and zoeschiffer.87. |
The per-country cap has led to a long backlog for immigrants from countries like India, some of whom have already been waiting for over a decade to receive a green card. The Trump administration hasn’t said whether it intends to permit Trump Card Visa holders to skip this line and receive permanent residency in the US on an accelerated timeline.
The US government has the capacity to dole out roughly 1.1 million permanent resident cards in the current fiscal year, which are divided into categories for family members, workers with advanced skills, and other groups based on precise rules.
Lutnick originally proposed Trump’s gold card as a replacement for one of these categories, known as the EB-5 investor visa, which is perhaps the closest thing the United States currently has to a golden visa.
Created by Congress in 1990, the program currently allows roughly 10,000 foreigners to obtain a green card each year by making a $1.05 million investment in the United States (or $800,000 in rural areas and regions plagued by high unemployment), supporting at least 10 full-time jobs.
When the program was initially crafted, experts say, lawmakers went to great lengths to ensure it wasn’t seen as a pathway for corrupt oligarchs to unfairly buy their way into the United States. Part of that effort was ensuring immigration authorities carefully assess each EB-5 application to verify the investment funds aren’t coming from illegal or unsavory sources.
“There’s a whole unit in USCIS filled with economists and national security experts” who review EB-5 applications, says Doug Rand, a former senior adviser at USCIS under the Biden administration. During his time in the government, Rand says, there was so much paperwork associated with EB-5 petitions that the towering stacks of files caused the floor inside USCIS headquarters to sag.
It’s not clear if this same level of scrutiny will be applied to the gold card program. When asked during the February briefing whether a Russian oligarch would be eligible, Trump said “yeah, possibly, hey I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”
Advocates for the existing EB-5 program say it has mostly been used by ordinary immigrants who saved for years to invest in American real estate developments and other enterprises, and expect to make their money back one day. In other words, it’s not a group of people who can typically afford to pay $5 million for a gold card and never see those funds again.
“Most people who are trying to take advantage of the EB-5 program as a pathway to a green card and citizenship do not have that type of money,” says Brad Sher, chief executive of EB5 Group, an investment firm that specializes in raising money for EB5 real estate projects. “They are mostly working-class people who work hard to save their money, and they’re often using a majority of their savings to come up with the investment amounts to take advantage of EB-5.” (Sher adds that he is supportive of Trump’s Gold Card, though he hopes it can coexist alongside the EB-5 visa).
During the initial Oval Office briefing on February 25, Lutnick said the gold card initiative would be launching in about two weeks. During his podcast interview, which came out a month later on March 20, he also claimed the project was right around the corner. “About two weeks from today it goes out,” Lutnick said, slicing his hand through the air for emphasis. Whether it’s actually ready and, if so, when it will be announced, remain unknown.
Additional reporting by Matt Giles and Zeyi Yang.