US President Donald Trump's administration unlawfully barred applicants from 39 travel-ban countries from receiving decisions on asylum, work permits, green cards and citizenship, a US federal judge ruled on Friday.
Chief US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, ruled that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services had adopted a series of unlawful policies targeting people from 39 African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries.
His ruling came in a lawsuit filed in March by a coalition of immigrant service organizations and labor unions challenging a suite of policies adopted starting in November by USCIS, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Those measures placed a hold on processing immigration benefit applications from people in the 39 countries subject to Trump's full or partial travel bans, which he has justified on vetting and security grounds. Green cards grant foreign nationals permanent resident status.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
McConnell, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said those policies "threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo."
The judge wrote: "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."
He said the immigrants at issue had adhered to the legal processes that Congress had enacted and USCIS had adopted by regulation, yet had been "stuck waiting, for months on end, for benefit requests that USCIS refuses to adjudicate."
"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,'" McConnell 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."
