Libyan Dr Faysal Alghoula needs to renew his green card to continue caring for roughly 1,000 patients in southwestern Indiana. But he hasn’t been able to do that since the Trump administration stopped reviewing applications for people from several dozen countries it deemed high-risk.

Alghoula has lived in the US since 2016, and his current visa will expire in September if his application is denied.

But, last week, Alghoula and doctors like him got a potential lifeline when the administration quietly made an exemption for physicians with pending visa or green card applications. It’s a move physicians, organisations and immigration attorneys had sought for months, citing widespread shortages and a high proportion of foreign-trained doctors, who disproportionately work in underserved areas, according to the National Library of Medicine.