Trump Announces $1.3 Billion In Sales Of 'Gold Card' Visas Since Dec. 10
Trump Announces $1.3 Billion In Sales Of 'Gold Card' Visas Since Dec. 10
President Donald Trump announced Dec. 19 that his administration has sold more than $1.3 billion worth of “Trump Gold Cards,” a new immigration program offering expedited residency to high-skilled foreign talent, with proceeds going toward paying down the national debt.
In remarks to the press, Trump said that sales had exceeded $1.3 billion and described the 
as a “green card on steroids.”
He said the option would allow companies to retain graduates from elite institutions, such as Harvard and Wharton, who might otherwise have to go back to their native countries upon graduation.
“They graduate from the top schools,” Trump said. “These people want to hire them. Now you’re able to buy a card and you’re able to keep people in the country.”
Trump highlighted how his immigration policy focuses on securing top talent and curbing illegal immigration.
“Under the Biden administration, 25 million people came in, and they came from prisons and mental institutions, and they were drug dealers and all sorts of people came in that shouldn’t be here. They came from the jails,” he said.
, the Gold Card allows businesses to purchase the visas for foreign workers, enabling them to stay indefinitely with work rights. The visa costs $1 million in the form of a donation to the U.S. federal government.
The program, which has been challenged legally, began 
applications on Dec. 10.
Trump launched the Gold Card in September with an executive order and
current holders and renewals, according to the White House.
Trump first 
the Gold Card visas in February, floating a $5 million price tag for residency and a path to citizenship.
“Wealthy people will be coming into our country,” he said when he proposed the program. The administration launched a dedicated website in June.
When launching the immigration Gold Card program, Trump said it would “reduce our taxes greatly and hopefully bring some great people into our country.”
Payments go straight to the U.S. Treasury. Howard Lutnick, secretary of commerce, was instrumental in launching the program, he said.
Twenty states, however, 
a lawsuit against the $100,000 H-1B fee, arguing it goes beyond executive authority.
Meanwhile, proponents say the program fixes longstanding issues with the H1-B lottery system.
Mon, 12/22/2025 - 04:15
The Epoch Times
What to Know About Trump’s New ‘Gold Card’ Visa Program
The United States joins a global trend of offering residency in exchange for large capital contributions.
The Epoch Times
Trump Announces $1.3 Billion in Sales of Gold Card Visas
The proceeds are going toward paying down the national debt.
The Epoch Times
Trump Admin Opens Applications for $1 Million Immigration Gold Card
The Trump Gold Card will allow foreign nationals to receive expedited permanent residency status in the United States if they donate $1 million to ...
The Epoch Times
Trump Adds $100,000 Fee for H-1B Visas, Launches New ‘Gold Card’ Visa
The president said the change will raise revenues and limit the flow of foreign workers that compete with Americans.
The Epoch Times
Trump to Launch ‘Gold Card’ Visas That Would Grant Residency for $5 Million
The new visa will grant green card privileges and a path to citizenship. ‘Wealthy people will be coming into our country,’ the president said.
The Epoch Times
20 States Sue Trump for Imposing $100,000 Fee on H-1B Visas
Twenty states filed a suit claiming that the president exceeded his authority by imposing the fee.
Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge
Zero Hedge
Trump Announces $1.3 Billion In Sales Of 'Gold Card' Visas Since Dec. 10 | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
He has also lately said that Ukraine's foreign minister had started the initial work on the infrastructure needed for Ukrainians living abroad to participate.
The four oblasts that President Putin has called "our four new regions" and "our citizens forever" include Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions - and were annexed after a popular referendum during the first year of the war.
Putin has blasted Zelensky's rule as illegitimate given the canceled elections based on enacting a state of martial law, and President Trump has expressed increasing agreement with this perspective.
Still, Zelensky's new 'openness' with holding an election has been coupled with plenty of caveats and likely immense barriers. For example last week he 
This comes after the video exploded online, exposing the kind of unhinged intolerance conservatives face daily from those who preach “kindness” but deliver harassment.
The incident unfolded in a Chico, California Target store, where Ponce confronted 72-year-old employee Jeanie Beeman over her shirt. As we previously reported in our coverage of the meltdown and the subsequent police investigation, Ponce labeled Beeman as “racist” and “ignorant,” escalating into a public spectacle that left the senior worker shaken.
Ponce, an employee at Enloe Health, filmed the encounter herself, apparently seeking viral clout. Instead, it backfired spectacularly, drawing widespread condemnation for bullying an innocent woman simply expressing her support for conservative values.
The Chico Police Department also investigated the incident after it went viral but determined Ponce’s actions did not constitute criminal conduct.
In their official statement, they noted: “While the interaction was tense and inappropriate, it did not rise to the level of criminal conduct. The customer’s actions, though discourteous, were protected under the First Amendment as freedom of speech. As a result, there are no criminal charges appropriate to file in this case.” You can read the full statement 
The Wall Street Journal reports that a U.S. military official said Friday that dozens of targets were being struck by U.S. F-15 and A-10 warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and Himars rockets.
The operation is being dubbed “Hawkeye Strike” in honor of the Iowa National Guard soldiers who were killed and wounded in an ambush the Trump administration has blamed on ISIS.
The gunman that ambushed the Americans was killed in the attack.
But President Trump on Sunday vowed to take military action against the group.
“There will be a lot of damage done to the people that did it. They got the person, the individual person, but there will be big damage done,” Trump said at the time.
Syrian authorities last week blamed the ambush on a member of Syria’s security forces who they said was set to be fired for holding extremist views.
* * *
Syria is celebrating after President Trump 
Sanctions have been on Syria going all the way back to the 1970s, with more piled on over the decades, especially after 2011, and then the most far-reaching, the Caesar sanctions, took effect in 2019 at a time that Assad was winning the war.
Coupled with the sanctions was a long-running CIA and Gulf-spearheaded proxy war, which flooded jihadist groups with weapons and cash - all for the sake of eventually installing a more pliant client ruler.
Now, one year after Washington accomplished its regime change, and with Bashar al-Assad in Moscow, has Washington chosen to remove the sanctions.
As Beirut-based 
Shellenberger pointed out that Musk’s fine came while European governments are demanding backdoor access to all private text messages (under the pretense of combatting the transmission of child pornography) and creating a so-called “Democracy Shield” of government-funded “fact-checkers” that enables “censorship by proxy.” He also noted that the European Commission announced the fine to coincide with the rollout of the Trump administration’s new 
Everywhere we look in Western countries, from the United Kingdom, through Europe to America (and even 
That principle underwrites reserve currencies, correspondent banking, sovereign debt markets, and cross-border investment. It is why central banks like Russia’s (once) accepted euros instead of bullion shipped under armed guard. It is why settlement systems like Euroclear exist at all. Once that rule is broken, capital does not debate. It reprices risk instantly and it leaves.
Confiscation sends a message to every country outside the Western political orbit: your savings are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant.
That is not a rules-based order. It is a selectively enforced order whose rules change the moment compliance ends. What we have is a compliance cartel, enforcing law upward and punishment downward, depending on who obeys and who resists.
Belgium’s fear is not legalistic. It is actuarial. Hosting Euroclear means hosting systemic risk. If Russia or any future target successfully challenges the seizure, Belgium could be exposed to claims that dwarf the sums being discussed. Belgium is therefore right to be skeptical of Europe’s promise to underwrite such colossal risk, given the bloc’s now shattered credibility. No serious financial actor would treat such guarantees as reliable.
Italy’s hesitation is not ideological. It is mathematical. With one of Europe’s heaviest debt burdens, Rome understands what happens when markets begin questioning the neutrality of reserve currencies and custodians.
Neither country suddenly developed sympathy for Moscow. They simply did the arithmetic before the slogans.
Paris and London, meanwhile, thunder publicly while quietly insulating their own commercial banks’ exposure to Russian sovereign assets, exposure measured not in rhetoric, but in tens of billions. French financial institutions alone hold an estimated €15–20 billion, while UK-linked banks and custodial structures account for roughly £20–25 billion, much of it routed through London’s clearing and custody ecosystem rather than sitting on government balance sheets.
This hypocrisy and cowardice are not accidental. Paris and London sit at the heart of global custodial banking, derivatives clearing, and FX settlement, nodes embedded deep within the plumbing of global finance. Retaliatory seizures or accelerated capital flight would not be symbolic for them; they would be catastrophic.
So the burden is shifted outward. Smaller states are expected to absorb systemic risk while core financial centers preserve deniability, play a double game, and posture as virtuous.
This is anything but European solidarity. It is class defense at the international level.
The increasingly shrill insistence from the Eurocrats that the assets must be seized betrays something far more revealing than hysteria or resolve: the unmasking of a project sustained by delusion and Russophobic dogma, in which moral certainty did not arise from conviction, but functioned as a mechanism for managing cognitive dissonance, a means of avoiding realities that any serious strategy would already have been forced to confront.
Not confidence, but exposure. Exposure of a war Europe never possessed the power to decide, only the capacity to prolong. Exposure of a financial system discovering that money, once stripped of neutrality and weaponized, forfeits its credibility as capital. And exposure of a ruling class confronting the reality that performance, however theatrical, cannot substitute for power that has long since been exhausted – power Europe relinquished decades ago when it outsourced real sovereignty to Washington.
Looting Russian reserves will not shorten the conflict. It will not pressure Moscow into capitulation. It will not meaningfully finance Ukraine’s future. And this is not because Europe has miscalculated, it is because Europe has knowingly abandoned reality.
There is no serious actor in Europe who does not understand how wars are won. They know that Russia’s war effort is driven by industrial throughput, manpower depth, logistics resilience, and continental scale and that on every one of these axes Russia has expanded its advantage while Europe has accelerated its collapse. Russia has retooled its defense-industrial base for sustained output, secured energy and raw materials at scale, reoriented trade beyond Western choke points, and absorbed sanctions as a catalyst for growth. This is not conjecture. It is observable fact.
This move will permanently accelerate reserve diversification away from the euro, expand bilateral settlement, hasten gold repatriation, and entrench non-Western clearing systems, and it will do so immediately.
What is being exposed here is not Russian vulnerability, but Western exhaustion. When economies can no longer compete through production, innovation, or growth, they turn to banditry. Asset seizure is not a sign of strength, but he terminal behavior of a rentier system that has exhausted surplus and begun consuming its own foundations.
This decision does not defend any lingering illusion of Western dominance. It advertises its expiry. The turn toward policing speech in Europe did not happen in a vacuum.
The Digital Services Act, platform intimidation, and the policing of dissent is all about pre-emptive damage control. European elites understand that the consequences of this policy will land squarely on households.
The people who will pay for this are not sitting in Commission buildings, they are the ones whose pensions, currencies, and living standards are being quietly offered up to preserve a collapsing illusion of power.
That is why dissent had to be neutralized before confiscation could be attempted. Not after. Criticism was pre-emptively reclassified as disinformation. Debate was recoded as existential danger. Speech itself was reframed as a security threat.
In their desperation to punish Russia, Europe’s leadership is handing Moscow something far more valuable than €210 billion. They are validating every argument held by the Global Majority about Western hypocrisy, legal nihilism, and financial coercion. They are demonstrating that sovereignty within the Western system is provisional, granted conditionally, revoked politically.
Empires do not collapse because they are challenged. They collapse because they cannibalize the systems that once made them legitimate.
This seizure will not be remembered as a blow against Moscow. It will be remembered as the moment Europe told the world that property rights end where obedience begins.
Once that message is received, there is no reset.
Blaise Metreweli, who recently became head of the Secret Intelligence Service—commonly known as MI6—said that Russia’s campaign against Ukraine and its wider hybrid operations pose an acute and enduring danger to Britain and its allies, according to a 
Mikhaila Peterson shared an update on social media this week—her first since October—to announce her father’s return home after spending time in an intensive care unit this fall, where he was treated for pneumonia and sepsis. Those conditions appeared after mold exposure this summer led to a “severe” flare-up of a chronic illness he has been battling since 2017, she said.
Specialists are continuing to work on determining the underlying cause of his illness and are considering a complex array of possibilities from neurological, to autoimmune, to a mixture of both.
Mikhaila said no answers have emerged thus far and he remains “very unwell.”
“I’m hopeful he will recover with time,” she said in a Dec. 9 video 
That latter part is likely designed to gain Trump's attention and sympathy, given the president has been emphasizing this point all the way back to his first term.
The bill if passed would require the US government to formally notify NATO that it intends to end its membership and halt the use of American funds for shared budgets. Republican Senator Lee actually introduced similar legislation earlier this year, but it stalled in committee.
Of course, most Congress members have viewpoints which merely reflect the 'pro-NATO' established position of the vast majority of Western politicians generally, so it's very unlikely to ever be passed.
Massie wrote on 
