The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. Historically, when a person applies for a benefit from America’s legal immigration agency (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services), a government official reviews the application and decides whether the person qualifies. But in late November last year, USCIS suspended the processing of immigration benefits for nationals of 39 different countries. That suspension was supposedly in response to a tragic shooting of two members of the National Guard that occurred in Washington D.C., as well as President Donald Trump’s executive orders restricting immigration and requiring “extreme vetting”. USCIS shunted thousands of applications to a filing cabinet where they sit, untouched — even though each applicant paid a substantial fee for the government to decide their case.
Now a federal judge has ruled that this policy is unlawful. The judge also struck down three related policies, two of which were also aimed at people who come from one of the 39 countries that President Trump has targeted with a ban on entry, and a third which imposed a blanket halt on asylum decisions at USCIS.
The decision requires USCIS to begin processing hundreds of thousands of suspended applications. It does not impact separate restrictions that the State Department implemented, including a “pause” on the granting of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, and President Trump’s 39-country travel/entry ban.
Should the Trump administration fail to obtain quick relief from an appeals court, USCIS will be required to return to treating all nationalities equally, imposing the same vetting standards to each person and granting all applications which meet federal requirements.
Background on the restrictions
The Trump administration first imposed these policies in December 2025, days after the tragic shooting of two national guardsmen in Washington by a troubled Afghan special forces soldier who had previously worked for a CIA-backed unit of the Afghan army. He entered the United States in 2022 and was granted asylum in March 2025. Before the shooting, his family had reported that he had spent “weeks on end” locked in his bedroom and refusing to talk to his family.
The administration quickly seized on the shooting to attack immigrants in general. President Trump declared on Truth Social that “most [immigrants] are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” A few days later, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirsti Noem declared on X, “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” and that “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”
Then on December 10, days before expanding the existing travel ban to 39 countries, President Trump declared that the ban would be “a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries,” that Haiti was a “shithole country” and that he’d prefer “some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark.”
During these weeks, USCIS announced four specific policy changes:
- A suspension of the granting of all applications for immigration benefits — including naturalization, green cards, work permits, and visa petitions — for nationals of countries subject to a travel ban.
- A policy declaring that any person who came from a country subject to one of President Trump’s travel bans should have their application treated from the start as if it had one strike against it; that officials must consider nationality as a “significant negative factor.”
- A “re-review” of all immigration benefits granted to people from one of the 39 countries since the start of the Biden administration.
- A suspension of the granting of asylum applications at USCIS for an indefinite period.
Due to these policies, hundreds of thousands of people suddenly had their applications put on hold — even if that meant that they would lose jobs or their right to remain in the country. One person who sued to block the policy is a cancer clinical researcher from Myanmar, whose work permit was delayed so long she risked being fired if the agency didn’t renew it.
Despite claims in the initial policies that suggested USCIS would lift these holds and implement new vetting standards within 90 days, nearly all the policies remained fully in effect six months later. Although the agency made some limited exceptions, and resumed some naturalization ceremonies, millions of applicants still faced an indefinite limbo based solely on their nationality.
What the court found
Throughout a lengthy 135-page decision, Judge John McConnell of the District Court of Rhode Island found that the policies were unlawful for multiple different, independent reasons.
First, Judge McConnell declared that USCIS lacked any legal basis to impose an indefinite suspension of immigration benefits. Multiple laws and regulations related to applications, including asylum and naturalization, declared that the government “shall” make decisions in regular order — meaning that the government lacked authority to refuse to adjudicate applications entirely. He also found that some of the policies were blocked by a law which makes it illegal for the federal government to discriminate on the basis of nationality in decisions relating to visas.
Next, Judge McConnell found that USCIS’ decisions to implement the policy were arbitrary and capricious; that is, not based on a reasoned explanation. He noted that the government made no argument at all as to why it was necessary to indefinitely suspend immigration benefits for countries as diverse as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nigeria just because of the violent acts of a person from Afghanistan.
Finally, Judge McConnell held that the evidence makes clear that the Trump administration’s intent for the policies was rooted in unlawful bigotry against immigrants from certain countries.
He noted that even the government refused to defend President Trump and Secretary Noem’s comments in court, only saying that they were not directly related to the policies. But Judge McConnell did not buy that explanation, writing that it was “impossible to ignore the backdrop against which the Challenged Policies were implemented,” and that ignoring “the strong evidence of anti-immigrant animus … would require profound naiveté on the Court’s part.”
What comes next?
Judge McConnell’s decision went into effect immediately, requiring USCIS to stop implementing these policies and begin adjudicating applications from those impacted again.
The Trump administration can next appeal the decision to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. In previous cases, the administration has sought emergency “stays” of lower court decisions blocking their immigration policies and could do so in this case too. If the First Circuit denies such a stay, then the Trump administration would have to go straight to the Supreme Court and ask for an emergency decision on the court’s “shadow docket.”
Whether it will pursue this path remains unclear. But for now, the Trump administration’s policy of openly discriminating against people on the basis of where they were born, not the content of their character or their individual circumstances, has been blocked.
