U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services notified refugees in February that if they have lived in the country for more than one year without applying to become a lawful permanent resident – a green-card holder – they are subject to immigration detention. A new program is helping hundreds of refugees in Cuyahoga County with compliance.
“Operation Green Card” was created in late 2025 by Re:Source Cleveland, a refugee assistance organization, to expedite the green-card process by identifying refugees who have yet to apply for green cards and connect them with a team of immigration attorneys.
Re:Source Cleveland Executive Director Patrick Kearns said the application process is confusing.
“If you don't understand it to start with and you arrive here legally and you have a work permit and you can get a driver's license, you might not understand that there's a whole other category of compliance you need to be in. If nobody tells you that you just kind of go about your life,” Kearns said.
In the program, attorneys walk refugees through the required paperwork, which includes legal and medical documents.
“A lot of these folks, the parents do not speak English. A lot of them were conflict displaced as children. They might be illiterate in their home languages,” Kearns said. “It is really common that folks don't realize there's a next step to complete.”
Re:Source pays for the legal services with donated funds and partnered with Imago Legal Immigration Services. Imago Managing Director Nick Tribuzzo said the application process can normally be time consuming and costly and this project can double the speed of the process.
“It takes many hands to move these cases forward,” Tribuzzo said. “When they don't have an advocate that's helping them do the things outside of what our legal team can do, it slows things down a lot.”
Kearns said Re:Source is helping about 400 individuals, which he believes was the majority of refugees in Cuyahoga County who had not yet started a green card application when Operation Green Card began. He expects all 400 of them to have paperwork filed and sent to USCIS in the next few weeks.
Currently, about 130 of the clients have received notifications of receipt for their applications from USCIS.
One client wanted to remain anonymous due to her concerns about immigration enforcement. She spoke in Swahili, interpreted by Re:Source Cleveland Newcomer Navigator Augustin Semandwa.
“She heard people talking that applying for a green card sometimes can be a lengthy process,” Semandwa said. “Financially she was a bit in trouble, and she was wondering how she would come out of this in terms of payment and stuff.”
There are additional steps for obtaining a green card including filing additional paperwork and setting up an interview with USCIS, but in 2025 the agency paused approval of green-card applications for several different refugee and immigrant communities so many of them can’t currently take those steps.
It’s a grey area whether they’re subject to immigration detention after sending in the application, but Kearns said getting to this point is a key defense against enforcement because the receipt of the application comes with a unique serial number.
“The national consensus for immigration lawyers is the best and only thing to do is assure that these individuals have submitted their application, that they receive the receipts, they have the serial numbers and they present those if needed,” Kearns said.
Kearns said it wasn’t the USCIS update in February that sparked the idea for Operation Green Card but rather changes to the federal budget last year that made adult refugees ineligible for federal food assistance unless they become lawful permanent residents.
Another green-card policy change from last month was that foreigners temporarily living in the U.S. seeking green cards will have to leave for their home countries to go through the application process.
Kearns says this is a different population from the refugees he’s working with on this project and Operation Green Card will continue.
