A US district judge decided on Friday that President Donald Trump's administration illegally prevented applicants from 39 travel-ban nations from receiving decisions on citizenship, work permits, green cards, and asylum.
In Providence, Rhode Island, Chief US District Judge John McConnell declared that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services had implemented several illegal procedures that targeted individuals from 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern nations, as reported by Reuters.
The ruling was made in response to a case brought in March by a group of labour unions and immigrant assistance organisations contesting a set of regulations implemented by United States Citizenship and immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, beginning in November.
These actions halted the processing of immigration benefit applications from citizens of the 39 nations where Trump has imposed full or partial travel restrictions, which he has defended on the basis of security and vetting. Foreign nationals can become permanent residents with green cards.
Barack Obama, a Democrat, had appointed McConnell, who claimed that these actions "threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo."
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The judge stated: "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."
The immigrants in question, he claimed, had followed the legal procedures that USCIS had established by regulation and Congress had passed, but they 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 reportedly 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."
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