A federal judge in Manhattan has dealt a fresh blow to the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration agenda, striking down a sweeping visa ban that barred the issuance of most permanent immigrant visas to applicants from 75 countries around the globe. In a ruling issued Friday, Judge Jeannette Vargas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found the policy exceeded the statutory authority of the Secretary of State and directly contradicts existing U.S. immigration law.
The controversial policy first rolled out in January by the State Department, which targeted nations accounting for nearly 40 percent of the world’s population. Major countries included in the ban were Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Haiti, Somalia, and Russia, with the full list spanning the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. A large majority of the countries on the list are non-European, and it includes several key U.S. international partners, such as Jordan, Egypt, and Georgia. State Department officials justified the ban by claiming it would block entry to immigrants who would allegedly rely on public welfare and government assistance, building its country list using data showing more than 30 percent of immigrant households from the targeted nations received some form of public benefit.
The ban only applied to permanent-residence immigrant visas for people reuniting with family members or accepting employment in the U.S., and did not restrict temporary nonimmigrant visas for tourists, students, or business travelers. But internal guidance from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, distributed via a cable to all U.S. diplomatic and consular posts and entered into the court record, required officers to reject all qualifying applications from the 75 countries regardless of individual circumstances. Even when applicants submitted additional evidence proving they could support themselves and would not become dependent on government aid, the policy still mandated automatic rejection. “The outcome is predetermined,” Vargas wrote in her ruling. “The visa will be refused.”
Under longstanding U.S. immigration law, a prospective immigrant can only be denied entry on public charge grounds — the classification for people deemed likely to depend on government support — after a consular officer conducts an individualized assessment of the applicant’s personal finances, age, health, professional skills, and family situation. Vargas ruled that the blanket country-wide ban violated this requirement, as it forced automatic rejections even for self-sufficient applicants solely based on their country of origin. The judge also found the policy ran afoul of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which explicitly prohibits nationality-based discrimination in visa issuance, and violated a separate provision that bars the Secretary of State from dictating individual case decisions to consular officers.
The lawsuit challenging the ban was brought by 11 plaintiffs, including six U.S. citizens who had filed family-based visa petitions for relatives in Ghana, Jamaica, Guatemala, and Ethiopia, and five Colombian applicants seeking employment-based visas. One of the Colombian plaintiffs had already received a formal visa denial that explicitly cited the contested policy.
In defending the policy, the Trump administration’s legal team pointed to a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the third iteration of Trump’s first-term travel ban targeting multiple majority-Muslim nations. But Vargas drew a clear distinction between the two policies, noting that the 2018 case centered on the president’s statutory authority to screen who may enter the country, while the current case addressed the Secretary of State’s authority to set rules for visa eligibility itself. The administration did score one narrow victory in the ruling, as Vargas agreed the policy did not qualify as a formal regulation requiring advance public comment before implementation.
Friday’s ruling reverses all visa denials that were based solely on the country-wide ban, though denials grounded in other independent legal grounds will remain in place. As a result, the exact number of visa decisions that will be overturned remains unclear. Vargas, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has given both parties until September 11 to submit proposals for resolving the remaining portions of the case. The Trump administration has the option to appeal the ruling to a higher federal court. CNN has reached out to the Department of Justice and the White House to request comment on the decision, and no official response has been released as of the ruling’s publication.