WASHINGTON DC: The U.S State Department has paused all immigrant visa interviews worldwide — not just for the 75 countries targeted in January 2026 — while consular officers undergo “public charge” training.
The stated aim is stricter screening to keep out applicants deemed likely to depend on US public benefits.
Applicants with scheduled interviews were emailed that appointments are cancelled, with no timeline for rescheduling. It follows a court ruling last week blocking the earlier 75-country freeze, and comes a day after DHS proposed a $103,265 H-1B application fee.
Kenya was notably excluded from the January 2026 75-country freeze — while Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, DRC, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan were hit, Kenya was spared.
That exemption is now moot: because this new pause is universal rather than country-targeted, Kenyan applicants for family-based, employment-based, diversity-visa (green card lottery), and adoption-category immigrant visas are affected just like everyone else.
Key impacts:
Diversity Visa (green card lottery) applicants — Kenya is consistently one of the top DV-lottery source countries in Africa.
Winners face fixed program deadlines; a prolonged, open-ended pause risks winners losing eligibility if visas aren’t issued within the fiscal year.
Family reunification — Kenyans with approved petitions (spouses, parents, siblings of US citizens/green card holders) face indefinite delays, on top of already-cancelled interviews.
Remittances — This lands during an already fragile period: Kenya’s diaspora inflows fell for the first time on a year-to-date basis in 2026, with North America (over half of all inflows) showing double-digit monthly drops earlier this year.
Fewer new immigrants settling and working in the US over time could compound this trend, though the immediate effect is more about blocked family/DV migration than existing diaspora earners.
No visitor-visa impact — this pause is specific to immigrant (permanent) visas, not tourist/business (non-immigrant) visas, so it doesn’t directly touch Kenya’s tourism or World Cup/Olympics-related travel.
This development sits alongside a wider tightening — the H-1B fee hike, social media vetting, asylum-visa revocations, and the earlier country-specific freeze that courts have now begun pushing back on.
It signals the “public charge” doctrine has become the administration’s primary lever for restricting legal immigration broadly, not just from named “high-risk” countries — meaning Kenya’s earlier exemption offered less protection than it appeared to.
