Kenneth Lukong moved from his native Cameroon to the United States in 2016 to become a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and by all appearances things were going smoothly.

He graduated from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in 2022 and was soon ordained. He became an associate pastor at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Roland Park, where he celebrates 10 Masses and hears hundreds of confessions a week, performs baptisms, teaches Catholicism and serves as chaplain of the School of the Cathedral.

But now, the beloved 33-year-old could be forced to leave the country as early as April.

Lukong is one of 15 foreign-born priests serving in the Baltimore archdiocese — and one of thousands of religious workers nationwide — whose eligibility to live and serve in the U.S. is set to end in the next year, thanks to a change State Department officials made last year in how they interpret a federal law.

Barring some change, that will have a major effect on religious life in the United States, particularly in Catholicism. Fully 24% of the Catholic priests working in the U.S. are imports from other nations today, according to a study published by the Catholic University of America’s Catholic Project in 2022. And up to 50% of all foreign-born religious workers in the U.S. could be forced to return to their home countries by the end of 2025, according to study conducted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“This was a big change — it came out of left field, and it was a shock — and it is having a huge effect on religious workers,” said Alexander Volpe, a Denver-based lawyer who represents Catholic dioceses. “It is causing a lot of heartburn for us and our clients.”

Up until April 1, 2023, immigration experts say, the pathway of religious workers from other countries who want to live and work in the U.S. was relatively straightforward and hassle-free. Their first step was to apply for (and usually receive) a temporary visa, known as an R-1, which confers the right to stay and work in the country in a religious capacity for up to five years.

Next they’d seek a visa that grants those rights permanently. Applicants for the EB-4 visa were also generally approved (and their green cards granted) in less than a year and a half.

Nearly 19 months ago, though, the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, a division of the State Department, announced a change in how it will interpret the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a federal law that has served as a bedrock of American immigration policy since 1965.

The tweak effectively added as many as 170,000 new people to the category of individuals eligible to apply for the EB-4. But a cap on the number of EB-4s granted each year remained at 10,000.

Observers say the change has created such a bottleneck it will now take up to 10 times as long — in many cases, between 10 and 15 years — for religious workers to get a green card. And by that time, their permission to stay and work in the country on their temporary visa will have long since expired.

One immigration lawyer who specializes in religious matters, Mary O’Leary of Petoskey, Michigan, calls the situation a “ticking time bomb.”

According to the American Immigration Council, U.S. immigration law prioritizes four principles: reuniting families, admitting immigrants with skills valuable to the economy, providing humanitarian protections and promoting diversity.

The Immigration and Nationality Act provides the necessary framework. It establishes two main categories: family-based and employer-based (EB) immigration. Each contains sub-categories, and a cap is set on the number of foreign-born individuals who may be approved annually.

On the employer-based side, applicants are divided into four subcategories. The fourth and last of these, the EB-4, is for what officials call “special immigrants.”

Experts call the category a hodgepodge, as it essentially consists of individuals who don’t fit into the other groups. They include translators, broadcasters, certain employees of international organizations and religious workers.

For at least 15 years, the numbers were such that the religious workers overwhelmingly had their cases processed long before their five-year temporary stay was up, said Volpe, the Denver-based lawyer.

That changed in March 2023, when USCIS officials decided to reconsider how they classify a group of people that had previously occupied a special category. Known as special immigrant juveniles, they consisted overwhelmingly of unaccompanied minors from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, a region immigration officials refer to as Northern Central America, or NCA.

Their numbers had exploded over the previous decade or so, reaching totals of between 85,000 and 170,000, immigration lawyers say.

Volpe said the decision did not represent a change to the INA, which would have required an act of Congress. It was a change in how authorities interpreted the law.

“The USCIS essentially announced that they woke up one day and decided that they have been interpreting it incorrectly,” Volpe said. “The change was certainly helpful for the NCA minors who have come across the border. Those from NCA countries can get visas faster now. But in a category with a total cap of 10,000 per year, you do the math. Religious workers were put much further back in line.”

A State Department spokesman did not directly respond to a question about why officials made the change. Instead he pointed to an entry in the March 28, 2023, edition of the Federal Register, the daily journal of the U.S. government.

The entry refers, in heavily bureaucratic language, to a “misapplication of the law” that dated to 2016. The new change “corrects” that misapplication, it said.

Asked how the department would respond to critics who might say the changes are unfair to religious communities, the spokesman declined to answer directly.

“We recognize the importance of religious ministers and workers as well as their U.S. employers who lead faith-based institutions,” he wrote.

Immigration officials first learned of the changes in mid-March through posts in the Visa Bulletin, a monthly publication from the State Department that provides information about visa availability and cutoff dates. The government offered no period for public comment, and the changes went into effect within two weeks.

“It gave us very little time to strategize,” O’Leary said.

Word of the complicated change has spread so slowly, she added, that many of the priests and communities it would affect still know little about it or find its implications baffling.

One place the news hit hard was in the Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, which, along with five of its priests filed a lawsuit against the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and USCIS in U.S. District Court in August. According to the suit, four of the priests’ visas are due to expire in 2025, one in the following year.

Volpe said he has heard no recent updates on the case. “Litigation is not a fast process,” he said.

It remains unclear whether the government will actually deport foreign-born religious workers when their current temporary visas expire, as Lukong’s does in April. But immigration attorneys agree their right to live and work in the U.S. will lapse when their visas do, leaving them vulnerable to expulsion.

The change applies to religious workers in all faith traditions, but it would likely have a disproportionate impact on the American Catholic church. Between 1970 and 2020, the number of priests in the U.S. dropped by a full 60%, leaving some 3,500 parishes without a resident pastor, according to data from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

Priests from Nigeria, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Vietnam and other countries have filled the gap: Of the roughly 37,000 Catholic priests working in the U.S. today, about 6,600 were born in other nations, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Baltimore archdiocese also employs clerics from Mexico, Uganda, Korea, Pakistan and Italy.

“We have guys here from Vietnam, several African countries and several Latin American countries, and when they come, their value is that they can minister to people with an appreciation and experience of the culture and the language,” Proffitt said, adding that Spanish-speaking priests are especially important at a time when the Hispanic Catholic population continues to grow in the archdiocese.

Officials of the U.S. church have been negotiating with members of the Biden administration to try to get the new protocol changed, Volpe said. Though it would take an act of Congress to alter the INA, State Department officials could effect administrative changes such as reducing to 30 days the amount of time expelled priests would have to spend outside the country.

Lukong says he’s still not clear what the new protocol might portend for him. He has been discussing the matter with parishioners who fear for his future, he said, and he’s praying the changes will have less of an impact on the church than they seem destined to.

“I hope the powers that be consider carefully whether they’re causing more harm than good. The harvest is great, and the laborers are few. But like Abraham in faith, I will follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit when the time arrives,” he said.