US choose guidelines in opposition to Trump insurance policies focusing on immigrants from 39 travel-ban international locations | Trump administration

The Trump administration unlawfully barred candidates from 39 travel-ban international locations from receiving selections on asylum, work permits, inexperienced playing cards and citizenship functions, a US federal choose dominated on Friday.

The resolution got here on the identical day that the US Senate voted to move laws to fund Donald Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown

Chief US district choose John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, dominated that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had adopted a sequence of illegal insurance policies focusing on individuals from 39 African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern international locations.

His ruling got here in a lawsuit filed in March by a coalition of immigrant service organizations and labor unions difficult a collection of insurance policies adopted beginning in November by USCIS, which is a part of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), amid the US president’s anti-immigration agenda.

Those measures positioned a maintain on processing immigration profit functions from individuals within the 39 international locations topic to Trump’s full or partial journey bans, which he has justified on vetting and safety grounds. Green playing cards grant international nationals everlasting resident standing within the US.

The DHS didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

McConnell, who was appointed by Barack Obama, stated these insurance policies “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo.”

The choose 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 the US 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, including: “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.”