Muslim migrants stranded after U.S. President Donald Trump cancelled all U.S. asylum appointments for migrants waiting in Mexico are seen at the Assabil shelter, the only such refuge in Mexico specifically for Muslim migrants, in Tijuana, Mexico January 21, 2025. Image@ REUTERS/Jorge Duenes/File Photo
A federal court in Rhode Island has dealt a significant blow to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, with a judge ordering immigration authorities to resume processing applications for hundreds of thousands of people from 39 countries who had spent months trapped in bureaucratic uncertainty.
For more than six months, immigrants from the 39 designated nations had lived in legal limbo as the federal government refused to make decisions on their work permits, asylum claims, green cards and citizenship applications, leaving many unable to work and at risk of deportation. On Friday, Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. in Providence, Rhode Island, put an end to that freeze, declaring it illegal.
McConnell admonished the Trump administration for taking actions designed to unwind the lives of those who had lawfully immigrated to the United States. In sharp language, he wrote that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had enacted policies “that threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo’” people who had done nothing wrong. “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,” the judge wrote.
The affected countries include Afghanistan, Iran, Haiti, Somalia, Venezuela and Syria, among others spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. USCIS suspended the adjudication of all asylum applications and decided that going forward, any applicant for immigration benefits from one of the 39 travel ban countries would be subject to the processing freeze. McConnell, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, found that the agency had acted without the legal authority required and had relied on “pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments.”
The administration had tied the immigration restrictions to a November 2025 shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., which prosecutors attributed to an Afghan immigrant, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who has pleaded not guilty. In his order, McConnell called out Trump and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s posts and statements following the shooting, including a Truth Social post from the president the day after the incident, asserting that refugees are “the leading cause of social dysfunction in America.”
The judge was unmoved by those justifications. “But the rule of law has to apply to everyone equally and, as evident here, USCIS has neither ‘followed the law’ nor ‘done things the right way,’” he wrote. “Indeed, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering, as well as the administrative laws that govern the agency’s actions.”
McConnell ordered USCIS to restart application processing for all immigrants affected by the pause, ruling the agency can no longer rely on the blanket policies. He also said immigration officers cannot treat all individuals from particular countries as presenting an increased national security risk.
The ruling was a victory for a coalition of immigrant service organisations and labour unions that had filed suit in March to challenge the USCIS directives. “This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: the federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, the liberal legal group representing the plaintiffs.
Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran heading the Afghan resettlement coalition #AfghanEvac, described the ruling as a “significant victory for the rule of law and for thousands of Afghan allies and other immigrants who followed every requirement asked of them.” The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah