On a pivotal Friday ruling that delivered a major legal rebuke to one of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies, a federal judge struck down a sweeping set of restrictions that halted adjudication of asylum, work permit, green card, and citizenship applications for immigrants born in 39 nations across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama sitting in Providence, Rhode Island, found the policies implemented by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) lacked any valid statutory or regulatory authority. In his scathing 42-page opinion, McConnell wrote that the arbitrary freeze left thousands of law-abiding applicants trapped in permanent legal uncertainty, or what he termed “indeterminate legal limbo.”
McConnell emphasized that every affected immigrant had followed all procedural requirements laid out by congressional legislation and USCIS’s own official regulations, yet were forced to wait months — and in many cases years — without any word on their legally filed applications for immigration benefits. “USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth,” the judge wrote. He further added that the policies were shaped by impermissible anti-immigrant bias, a motive that federal law explicitly bars from influencing administrative decision-making.
The restrictions were rolled out as part of a broader immigration crackdown launched by the Trump administration in the wake of a November 2020 shooting that killed two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. The attack was perpetrated by an Afghan immigrant, and the administration subsequently expanded existing travel bans to impose a full halt on all immigration benefit processing for applicants from 39 countries, including high-profile entries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, Somalia, Venezuela and Syria. At the time, the White House defended the measures as necessary national security vetting to screen out potential security threats.
Friday’s ruling marked a landmark legal victory for a cross-coalition of immigrant advocacy groups and labor unions, which first brought the challenge against the policies in March of the same year. The coalition was represented by Democracy Forward, a progressive legal organization whose executive director Skye Perryman celebrated the court’s decision. “This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: the federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” Perryman said in a statement following the decision.
As of Friday evening, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of USCIS, had not issued any immediate response to requests for comment on the ruling. McConnell closed his opinion by underscoring that the rule of law requires equal application to all people regardless of origin, noting that USCIS had failed to uphold even basic legal standards in implementing the controversial policies. “Indeed, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering, as well as the administrative laws that govern the agency’s actions,” he wrote.