By Zachary Stieber
Contributing Writer
The Trump administration must restart processing claims of asylum, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
Officials must also resume adjudicating requests for immigration benefits such as work permits from nationals of 39 countries from which President Donald Trump has restricted travel, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr., based in Rhode Island, said.
The Department of Homeland Security and its U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division, which implemented the challenged policies, said they did not agree with the ruling.
“The Left has been running the same gambit with so-called ‘animus’ claims since 2017. It is sabotage dressed in legal clothing,” James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, said via email. “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. They have used it on virtually every Trump-era Department of Homeland Security policy.”
“These policies were wrong, plain and simple, and caused … profound fear and uncertainty for so many of our friends, neighbors and coworkers,” Milagro Sique, CEO of Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Having the judicial process work as intended — by upholding the rule of law — gives us some reassurance that all is not lost and allows those who have been impacted to move forward with their lives in a meaningful way.”
The administration in late 2025 announced the policies in the wake of the shooting, allegedly by an Afghan national, of National Guard members near the White House. USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said at the time that asylum claims would not be processed “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”
A coalition of groups, including the Service Employees International Union and the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit over the policies in March. They said that the policies violated federal law because they went beyond the authority of USCIS, were arbitrary and capricious, and went against U.S. Constitutional protections.
Government lawyers said the policies fell within the authority Congress outlined in the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
McConnell said Friday in a 135-page decision that the policies “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo” solely because of where the immigrants were born.
He wrote that USCIS violated federal laws, in part because officials made decisions without adequate explanation.
“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,” he said. “In enacting its latest immigration policies, USCIS: claims statutory and regulatory authority that it does not possess; makes decisions without the reasoned explanations that it must provide; acts without regard for the reliance interests of applicants that it must consider; and justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making. In legal terms that means USCIS’s actions are contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.”
The ruling vacated the policies as illegal and set them aside, as well as two other USCIS policies.
One involved reviewing and reconsidering past decisions granting immigration benefits to any people from countries subject to Trump’s travel ban. The other featured amendments to the USCIS policy manual, requiring agency workers to take a person’s home country as a negative factor when deciding whether to grant requests for benefits.
