The Trump administration suffered a major setback Friday after a federal judge in Rhode Island struck down a series of immigration restrictions imposed following last year’s deadly National Guard shooting, ordering the government to resume processing immigration applications that had been frozen for months.Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unlawfully halted adjudication of immigration benefits for applicants from 39 countries subject to Trump’s travel bans and improperly suspended asylum processing nationwide.The policies, implemented around Thanksgiving, prevented immigrants from the affected countries from receiving decisions on applications for green cards, work permits, citizenship, and other immigration benefits. Trump also ordered a review of immigration benefits previously granted to individuals from those countries during the Biden administration.
In a 135-page ruling, McConnell said USCIS “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo” and found the agency lacked legal authority to impose the sweeping freezes.
“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,” wrote McConnell, who has both a history of liberal activism and ruling against the Trump administration in previous policy disputes brought in his courtroom.
