When she read the news, Grace felt like she was falling.

The 37-year-old oncologist had studied hard. And she’d sailed through her US citizenship interview. She thought just one step remained.

“Be on the lookout in the mail,” a US Citizenship and Immigration Services officer told her that day in September, she says. “You’ll get a notice to come for a ceremony.”

But instead, a few months later a government portal delivered a devastating update: “Oath ceremony cancelled.”

In an instant, the solid, American ground where she’d spent more than a decade building a career and life for her family seemed to disappear.

“It was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re in a free fall,’” Grace says. “We don’t know where we’re going to land.”

Grace is among a growing group of would-be Americans whose cases are now in limbo after the Trump administration indefinitely froze citizenship decisions for applicants from certain countries it deems “high-risk.” The pause also applies to applications for green cards and visas from nationals of those countries, which the Trump administration says “demonstrate significant deficiencies in screening, vetting and information sharing.”

CNN spoke with people across the US — in states including Washington, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Arizona and Massachusetts — who’ve been impacted by the sudden policy change, which critics decry as a move that punishes immigrants who follow the rules.

“I feel like it’s not very fair to be in this situation, because we worked really hard,” Grace says. The cancer doctor is originally from Africa and now lives in the Southern US. She asked to be identified by a pseudonym and that CNN not show her face, specify where she was born or reveal where she lives now because she fears she will be targeted for speaking out.

Immigrant advocates say cancelled citizenship interviews and oath ceremonies underscore deep concerns that even as the administration draws attention for its aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration, its quieter efforts to curtail legal immigration into the country are also intensifying.

“These are people that have been highly vetted already, so it doesn’t make any policy sense,” says Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which is tracking cancellation reports across the US.

Officials say the freeze is part of ‘rigorous screening and vetting’
Advocacy organizations and immigration lawyers say they first started seeing citizenship oath ceremony and interview cancellations late last year. In some instances, they say, officials notified people days before they’d been scheduled to take the oath, or pulled them out of line as they were heading into naturalization ceremonies.

Many of those with cancelled citizenship interviews and oath ceremonies are from the 39 countries listed in two travel ban proclamations President Donald Trump signed in June and December last year, according to advocates.

The majority of those countries are in Africa. Several are in Asia, the Middle East and South America.