Topline
President Trump touted Wednesday that “the waiting list is now open” for the $5 million Trump Gold Card visa—but immigration investment experts warn the nearly launched website does not look or feel like a legitimate government initiative.
A Shanghai-based netizen checks out the Trumpcard.gov website on June 12, 2025. (Photo by Wang Gang)
The URL of the Trump Gold Card website—trumpcard.gov—is itself a red flag, Nuri Katz, founder of Apex Capital Partners, who has a 34-year career providing investment immigration guidance to ultra-high-net-worth clients, told Forbes, since “to apply for immigration status, you go through U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services,” and online visa and green card applications are processed through URLs that begin with with “uscis.gov.”
Another concern: “Normally, there would be a disclaimer regarding data usage—‘we’re not going to use your data for this, we’re not going to use your data for that,’” says Katz, adding the site feels to him like a “commercial enterprise.”
The Trump Card website displays the presidential seal (which Trump has used to promote his private ventures), flanked by the seals for the Department of Commerce (DOC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—but a DHS official did not answer Forbes’ questions about the agency’s involvement in the website, instead directing us to the Department of Commerce email address on Trumpcard.gov.
At the bottom right corner of the Trump Gold Card website, a link goes to a generic Department of Commerce email address—not DHS or USCIS, as would be expected.
On the intake form, the prompt “I’m interested as…” has a dropdown menu where users can designate themselves as “an individual” or “a business”—but “companies can’t apply for a green card,” points out Katz.
That the website’s intake form asks for the user’s region instead of country is “another red flag, absolutely,” says Katz, as “it appears they're just trying to gauge interest” and not even take into consideration Trump’s newly enacted travel ban for more than a dozen countries.
“I have been confused from the start about how the Gold Card is meant to work and how it fits into our immigration laws, and this is a continuation of strangeness,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told Forbes.
No. Trump told followers on Truth Social that the waiting list for the Gold Card was open, but Katz says it could be years before applications are actually being processed—if that happens at all. “This is an attempt to say ‘we promised you a live website and now we have a live website,’ but having a website and being able to process applications is potentially years away from each other,” Katz said. Despite the Trump administration talking about the Gold Card visa since February, Congress has not initiated any legislation for changes to immigration and tax law that would be required. “Maybe President Trump is exploring some executive authorities that he sees as allowing him, or the administration, to create immigration pathways outside of our legal immigration system,” Gelatt said. “But certainly the executive branch doesn't have the authority to create a new visa without Congress' authority.” Trump’s Gold Card visa would replace the EB-5 program, which raised about $4 billion for the U.S. economy last year. “There is zero indication that the EB-5 program has been touched in any way,” Katz said. The Department of Commerce did not reply to Forbes’ questions regarding the creation of the website.
“This is a joke. [The Trump administration] is asking very wealthy individuals to trust a one-page website that feels like it was created in five minutes by a teenager in his bedroom,” Katz said, calling the new website “lazy” and “amateurish.” He directed Forbes to compare the lack of information at Trumpcard.gov to the copious information available on the USCIS website about the U.S. government’s EB-5 immigration investment program. Although the new website carries the phrase “an official website of the United States government” twice, “it doesn't look like it and it doesn't inspire confidence that this is really an official American government website,” Katz said. “The new website may say ‘The Trump Card Is Coming,’ but the creation of this website does not at all indicate that the administration is moving forward in a serious way with implementation of the Gold Card,” Gelatt said. “I suspect that President Trump is very eager to promote this idea, but members of the administration at DHS and at the State Department may be pushing the brakes on how they could implement this. And so the creation of a Department of Commerce website is a way to pretend, basically, to be moving forward towards implementation.” Katz puts it more bluntly: “The scariest thing is it just seems like an attempt by the government to bamboozle people into registering with this website in order to build up a database of rich people.” Gelatt is inclined to agree, telling Forbes, “I think if somebody is interested in pursuing a Gold Card, they could just wait and see. There’s no reason why they would need to enter their information now. It seems like an unusual information gathering attempt.”
Trump has suggested the U.S. could "sell maybe a million of these cards, maybe more than that." He said selling 1 million Gold Cards would raise $5 trillion, while 10 million cards could bring in $50 trillion, an amount that would be enough to eliminate the national debt and then some. In May, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tempered that ambition, floating figures as high as $1 trillion if 200,000 individuals invested.
“In my 34 years of experience, I have rarely seen anybody spend more than 10% of their net worth on an immigration program, and generally it's more like 5%,” Katz told Forbes. “So you've got to be worth $50 million to $100 million in order to be able to afford this.” Yet there are fewer than 30,000 centimillionaires in the entire world, according to a report from Henley & Partners, and more than one third are American. Even if you expanded the target audience to include non-Americans worth at least $50 million, there are still roughly only 80,000 individuals in the world who qualify. That’s 40% of what’s needed for Lutnick to achieve his $1 trillion goal—and less than 1% of the 10 million Trump said would generate $50 trillion in revenue. “The pool of global UHNWIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals) able—and willing—to contribute USD $5 million outright is relatively small, especially when compared to residence by investment alternatives that are investment-based rather than donation-based,” Henley & Partners told Forbes in an email.
Why Trump’s Gold Card Visa May Never Happen: ‘Math Does Not Add Up,’ Expert Says (Forbes)