A federal judge has struck down one of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching immigration policies, ruling that the government unlawfully froze green cards, work permits, citizenship, and asylum decisions for people from 39 countries – and finding that the real driver was bias, not national security.
On June 5, 2026, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the administration to restart processing the frozen applications, writing in a 135-page opinion that the court could not ignore the “strong evidence of anti-immigrant animus” behind the policy.
How the Freeze Began
The policy was rolled out after a shooting that wounded two National Guard members. In response, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services moved to categorically bar nationals of 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries from receiving final decisions on a wide range of immigration benefits.
That meant green card applications, work authorization, naturalization, and asylum claims were all placed in indefinite limbo – not for individuals flagged as risks, but for entire national populations. Hundreds of thousands of people who had followed every legal step suddenly found their cases frozen with no end date.
What the Judge Found
Judge McConnell’s ruling was blunt. He found that officials had taken the alleged actions of a single individual and extrapolated them to justify blocking benefits for people from dozens of unrelated countries. The government, he wrote, justified the freeze “with pretextual concerns of national security that mask anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”
In other words, the court concluded that the national-security rationale was a cover. Federal immigration law does not permit decisions to be driven by animus toward immigrants as a group, and the judge held that the administration had crossed that line.
The 135-page opinion details how the policy swept in people with no connection to the incident that triggered it – students, workers, family members of U.S. citizens, and asylum seekers who had passed every prior checkpoint in the system.
What Happens Now
The ruling orders the government to resume processing the frozen applications, opening the door for hundreds of thousands of people to finally get decisions that had been stalled for months. For families separated by the freeze and workers whose permits lapsed, the order is immediate and concrete.
The administration can appeal, and the legal fight may not be over. But for now, the freeze is lifted, and the agency is under a court order to start clearing the backlog it created.
Why It Matters
This decision is a check on a sweeping use of executive power. When the government can halt legal immigration for entire countries based on the actions of one person, the line between security policy and collective punishment becomes dangerously thin. The court’s job was to ask whether the stated reason matched the real one – and it found it did not.
For the people affected, the stakes are not abstract. These are individuals who applied through the legal system, waited their turn, and were told to keep waiting indefinitely because of where they were born. The ruling restores their place in line.
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