Redact your Green Card: remove the data, don't just cover it

A Green Card copy travels further than the card ever should, from leasing offices to a new bank. Next to your name sit two immigration numbers, your country of birth and a code for how you got residence, and the coded lines on the back repeat most of it for any scanner.

The tool above blacks out what you pick and builds a fresh image inside your browser, with no account. When the recipient should see every field and you only want a record of who got it, put their name across the copy with a watermark instead.

How to redact a Green Card copy

1. Add one side of the card

Photograph the card flat in even light, or drop in a scan: JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC or PDF. Rotate and Adjust crop fix a tilted shot. Do the front first. Unless someone named the back, I wouldn’t photograph it at all: a picture you never took can’t end up in the wrong inbox.

2. Tap the fields to hide

The tool reads the card in your browser and puts a chip on each field it recognizes. One tap turns it black, a second brings it back, and Show everything clears the lot. A Green Card isn’t one of the layouts it knows field by field, so expect some fields with no chip.

Redact by hand fills those gaps: drag a box over the area, or your finger on a phone. A box drawn this way becomes part of the image, which a rectangle in a PDF editor often isn’t, as the guide on how to redact a PDF properly shows.

3. Save the redacted copy

Pick PNG, JPG or PDF. The black goes into a newly built image, and the camera and location details of the original photo stay behind, the hidden layer explained in why a phone photo of an ID can carry its location.

What information is on a Green Card, field by field

USCIS calls it the Permanent Resident Card, Form I-551, and has issued the current design since January 30, 2023. Earlier designs stay valid until the date they expire, and USCIS uses up old card stock first, so a recently issued card can still look like the 2017 version.

The table reads USCIS’s 2023 specimen, issued to TEST V SPECIMEN, so every value is fictional. Of the nine labeled fields on the front, three concern your immigration file and a fourth says where you were born. Those four I would keep away from anyone who only needs to know it’s you.

A copy headed into an AI tool rather than to a person gets every row covered, name and photo included, as in the list of identifiers to strip before a file reaches a chatbot.

USCIS number vs card number on a Green Card

The front prints one number, labeled USCIS#. That’s your A-number: USCIS’s glossary calls it a unique seven-, eight- or nine-digit number DHS assigned to you. The N-400 instructions add that its length depends on when your record was created, and that forms want it padded with zeros to nine digits.

The card number is a different thing. USCIS’s SAVE tutorial for agencies says it’s printed on the back, is also called the document number, and runs 13 characters: three letters, then ten digits. On the 2023 specimen it’s MSC0000000110, and it never appears on the front.

The receipt number on a Form I-797 and the USCIS online account number get mixed up with these, and neither is on the card. When a form only says “Green Card number,” I would ask which one they mean before writing anything. A passport number has its own spots on a US passport copy.

Which Green Card number is more sensitive to share?

A common answer online says the card number is the one to hide and the USCIS number is safer to show. USCIS’s own pages don’t rank the two that way, and what they do say points the opposite way.

The I-90 instructions say USCIS uses your A-number to identify your immigration records, and the Policy Manual prints it on the Certificate of Naturalization, so it outlasts the card and even your status. The card number identifies one document. SAVE will take either to look a person up.

So the USCIS# is the one I would cover first, and it stays readable only for someone who has to record it. The card number goes black too: nobody matching your face to a photo needs it. A bank can often use your SSN instead, which has its own rules for redacting.

Machine-readable lines on the back of a Green Card

The bottom of the back holds three lines of 30 characters in the TD-1 layout from ICAO Doc 9303 Part 5, the card-size format also used on the back of a US passport card. A Green Card fills the slots its own way.

ICAO names positions 6 to 14 of the first line the document number. On both USCIS specimens, 2023 and 2017, that slot holds the USCIS#, and the check digit that follows matches it. The card number, which USCIS itself calls the document number, sits further along in the optional data.

Line 1 alone gives away both numbers; line 2 adds birth date, sex, expiry and a code matching Country of Birth on both specimens. If the tool puts a Machine-readable lines chip on them, make sure it’s black; if not, drag one box over all three. I wouldn’t leave one character of them readable.

When not to redact a Green Card: I-9, USCIS filings and the DMV

Some readers need the card whole. For Form I-9 your employer examines the original, and an E-Verify employer copies both sides for photo matching. What HR keeps, and for how long, is laid out in the guide to watermarking a Green Card, so I won’t go through it twice.

USCIS wants it unaltered too. The I-751 instructions ask for copies of both sides with a petition to remove conditions, and an I-90 for a card with a DHS error needs the original card itself. A DMV issuing a REAL ID checks DHS documents through SAVE, which runs on those numbers.

All of this is my reading of the form instructions in force in November 2026, and your own file can call for something they don’t cover. When a USCIS notice asks for more than the instructions do, follow the notice and check it with an immigration lawyer.

With a landlord, Country of Birth is the field I would never leave readable: the Fair Housing Act protects national origin, and a copy that never showed it keeps the question out. If the office will take a redacted driver’s license copy instead, your immigration file stays out of the application altogether.

Front only, or both sides covered: the copy that does the job

Most requests are met by the front alone, with the USCIS#, Country of Birth, Category and Resident Since covered. If someone insists on the back, every box you drew on the front needs a twin on the coded lines, or the copy hands back what you hid.

The same care applies to the other IDs that travel with a Green Card. Someone without a license can black out a state ID card for the same application, where the barcode plays the part of the coded lines.

If I could send only one image, it would be the front with those four boxes. The redaction tool at the top is free and keeps the card on your device. For an office whose staff type clients’ A-numbers into AI-drafted letters and forms, Nonimo’s desktop app handles the text side of the same problem.

Sources

• USCIS, Redesigned Green Card 2023. Specimen front and back behind the field table and the coded lines. uscis.gov
• USCIS, Instructions for Form N-400 (01/20/25). A-number length, zero padding, front or back placement, and the permanent resident date. Also read on USCIS: M-274 section 13.1, SAVE Tutorial (April 2025), I-90 (01/20/25) and I-751 (04/01/24) instructions, Policy Manual vol. 12 part K ch. 3, A-Number glossary. uscis.gov
• ICAO Doc 9303 Part 5, eighth edition (2021). TD-1 machine-readable zone, character by character. icao.int
• 22 CFR 42.11. Immigrant visa symbols, including IR1 and CR1. law.cornell.edu
• 31 CFR 1020.220. Bank customer identification: which numbers a bank may record for a non-US person. Also read: 6 CFR 37.13 (SAVE for REAL ID) and 19 CFR 122.49a (airline passenger data). ecfr.gov
• E-Verify, Photo matching. A Green Card triggers it; employers copy the front and back. e-verify.gov
• HUD, Fair Housing Act overview. National origin as a protected characteristic. hud.gov

Checked on November 7, 2026.