New York.- A federal judge in Rhode Island struck down this Friday as “illegal” the Donald Trump administration’s policies that paused immigration processes and asylum applications for people from 39 countries six months ago based on their place of birth.
In an opinion of more than 100 pages, Judge John McConnell Jr. noted that those policies of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) left “countless immigrants living in the U.S. in an indeterminate legal limbo,” and that they are “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious.”
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McConnell pointed out that USCIS exercises authority it lacks and “justifies its actions with merely pretextual ‘national security’ concerns, which cover up anti-immigrant sentiments that (the agency) is prohibited from allowing to influence its decision-making process.”
The agency paused the adjudication of immigration benefits for 39 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, whose citizens have been prevented from “receiving final decisions” on their applications for asylum, work permits, green cards, and U.S. citizenship.
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The judge held that the USCIS pause “cannot be attributed to anything these individuals did wrong, but rather emanates only from the happenstance of their birth,” and declared that the agency “violated the very immigration laws that Congress charged it to administer, as well as the administrative laws” by which it is governed.
Those policies, which include the so-called ‘migratory veto’ and a pause on asylum applications, were implemented after an Afghan citizen allegedly opened fire on the National Guard in Washington D.C. in November 2025, leaving one officer dead and another wounded.
The ruling includes in the explanation of the context some statements by former Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, endorsed by Trump, who recommended “a travel ban on every damn country that has flooded our nation with murderers, leeches, and welfare junkies,” and lashed out against “foreign invaders.”
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Most of the countries affected by these policies were African, and the American ones were Cuba, Venezuela, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and Haiti.
The decision was celebrated by ‘Democracy Forward’, one of the organizations representing immigrant and worker groups, including the ‘Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts’ and the ‘Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’.
“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: that the federal government cannot suspend legal immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” said Skye Perryman, president of ‘Democracy Forward’.
