A federal judge ruled Friday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had adopted a series of illegal policies that have prevented people from 39 countries from receiving decisions on applications for asylum, work permits, green cards and citizenship.
Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, struck down a series of policies that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had adopted that he said left people from dozens of African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries in “undetermined legal limbo.”
He said immigrants had adhered to the legal processes that Congress had enacted and USCIS had adopted by regulation, but had been “stuck waiting, for months, for applications for benefits that USCIS refuses to adjudicate.”
The judge, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said he adopted the policies without legal or regulatory authority and based on “anti-immigrant sentiments that he is prohibited from allowing to influence his decision-making.”
“USCIS’s withholding of awards cannot be attributed to anything these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely from the chance of their birth,” he wrote.
The ruling marked a victory for a coalition of immigrant services organizations and unions that filed a lawsuit in March challenging policies adopted by USCIS, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: The federal government cannot close legal immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” said Skye Perryman, leader of the liberal legal group Democracy Forward, which represents the plaintiffs.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
USCIS adopted the policies as part of a stepped-up immigration crackdown the Trump administration carried out after the November shooting of two National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., which prosecutors say was carried out by an Afghan immigrant.
The man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, pleaded not guilty.
In the wake of that incident, Trump vowed on social media to “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries to allow the American system to fully recover,” and expanded the number of countries now subject to full or partial travel bans under his administration to cover 39 nations.
Countries subject to total travel bans included Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, Somalia, Venezuela and Syria. The administration justified the travel restrictions for research and security reasons.
The policies adopted by USCIS suspended processing applications for immigration benefits from people from those 39 countries, which McConnell said “halted the lives of countless people, solely by virtue of their countries of birth.”
“But the rule of law has to apply to everyone equally, and as is evident here, USCIS has not ‘followed the law’ or ‘done things the right way,'” he wrote. “In fact, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress charged it with administering, as well as the administrative laws that govern the agency’s actions.”
