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.
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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.
The lawsuit was filed in March by a coalition of immigrant service organizations and labor unions challenging the policies, which affected applicants from 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries covered by Trump’s full or partial travel bans.
McConnell said the affected immigrants had complied with the legal immigration process established by Congress and federal regulations, yet remained stuck waiting months for decisions that USCIS refused to make.
“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,’” the judge wrote. “Indeed, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering.”
The ruling requires the administration to resume processing immigration applications and schedule naturalization ceremonies that had been canceled for thousands of immigrants nearing U.S. citizenship. Immigration advocates hailed the decision as a significant victory after months of uncertainty for applicants whose cases had stalled indefinitely.
Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival sharply criticized against the tactics used by ideologically-aligned litigants and judges in court over asylum policies, saying “The Left has been running the same gambit with so called ‘animus’ claims since 2017.”
“It is sabotage dressed in legal clothing,” he said of the pattern left-leaning groups have used in lawsuits against DHS policies. “It goes like this: (1) the admin is racist, (2) therefore a policy I don’t like is motivated by race, (3) therefore it is invalid.”
Meanwhile, Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac, said in a statement that “Today’s ruling is a significant victory for the rule of law and for thousands of Afghan allies and other immigrants who followed every requirement asked of them, only to see their cases frozen indefinitely.”
The deadly National Guard shooting occurred on Nov. 26, near the Farragut West metro station in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House, and nearly three months after Trump began the law enforcement crackdown in the district that involved a surge of more than 2,000 troops to the nation’s capital.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who entered the U.S. in 2021 under the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome program and received asylum earlier in April last year, allegedly ambushed four West Virginia National Guard members with a .357 Magnum revolver.
Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries the next day; Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, was critically wounded but survived. The suspect was shot and subdued during the attack.
The incident, described by officials as a targeted ambush, directly triggered the Trump administration’s swift rollout of the immigration freezes and reviews around Thanksgiving. The ruling comes as the Trump administration has secured a series of procedural victories in immigration cases before appellate courts and the Supreme Court.
In recent months, the high court has repeatedly allowed the administration to move forward with efforts to terminate Temporary Protected Status and other humanitarian programs while underlying legal challenges continue, including in an October emergency order permitting the administration to revoke deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants pending further court actions.
The justices are expected to rule by the end of June after recent oral arguments over the administration’s efforts to end TPS protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
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But lower courts have so far been less receptive when judges conclude administration policies conflict with statutes and procedures established by Congress. In April, the D.C. Circuit upheld a lower-court ruling blocking Trump’s asylum restrictions at the southern border, finding the administration could not override asylum protections enacted by lawmakers.
The Justice Department declined to comment on next steps in its legal strategy, though the administration is likely to appeal the judge’s order.
