Judge strikes down Trump asylum halt and visa processing freeze

A federal judge in Rhode Island blocked Trump administration rules that had stopped U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from granting asylum and other immigration benefits to people from 39 countries, forcing a restart for applications that had been frozen for months. Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. said the government had pushed immigrants into “indeterminate legal limbo” by halting decisions on asylum, green cards, work permits and citizenship applications, a move that hit people who had already filed paperwork, paid fees, given biometrics and gone through interviews.

McConnell’s 135-page opinion went to the heart of the administration’s strategy. He found the sweeping limits “arbitrary and capricious” and contrary to federal law, rejecting the agency’s claim that it could treat nationality from those 39 countries as a reason to stop adjudicating cases. The judge also said the earlier asylum pause had been lifted only partly in March, when USCIS resumed processing for most nationalities but kept the freeze in place for applicants from the travel-ban list. His ruling left intact a narrow boundary: it does not affect asylum cases handled by immigration judges at the border, only USCIS cases for people already inside the United States.

The policies came after the November shooting in Washington that killed one West Virginia National Guard member and seriously wounded another, and after authorities charged Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had been granted asylum, with the attack. The administration had tied the restrictions to national security, but McConnell said the harm fell on people who had done everything the law asked. “USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong,” he wrote. The ruling is broader than a technical setback: compared with last year’s restrictions, which began as a country-based screening regime and then expanded into a blanket processing freeze, the court struck down the mechanism that actually stopped legal-immigration cases from moving forward.

For applicants from the 39 countries, the decision means the agency cannot keep denying or delaying asylum grants and other benefits simply because of birthplace. It also removes the “significant negative factor” that USCIS had applied to nationality from those countries, opening the door again to asylum, green card, work authorization and naturalization processing for people whose cases had been held in suspense. Unless a higher court intervenes, the administration must comply with the injunction now, and the ruling lands as a direct rebuke to a strategy that had turned lawful applications into a prolonged wait without a decision.