A Federal Court Just Reopened the Door for Thousands of Applicants
If you have been following immigration news for the past six months, you know about the freeze. After a November 2025 shooting near Farragut West Metro station in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration used the tragedy as a pretext to suspend immigration processing on a massive, unprecedented scale. Green cards. Work permits. Naturalization ceremonies. Asylum applications. All of it, for people from 39 countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Frozen.
Today, a federal judge in Rhode Island said what immigration attorneys have been saying since the moment those memos dropped: this was illegal.
What the Court Ruled
In Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island et al. v. USCIS, Chief U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued a 135-page ruling vacating four Trump administration policies in one shot:
The global asylum hold -- suspending asylum adjudications nationwide
The benefits hold -- freezing work permits, green cards, and naturalization for people from 39 travel ban countries
The re-review policy -- ordering a look-back at benefits already approved under prior administrations
The country-specific factors policy -- requiring officers to treat nationality as a "significant negative factor" in benefit decisions
The ruling is nationwide. It is not a preliminary injunction that can evaporate on appeal. The court vacated those policies outright.
Judge McConnell was direct. The Immigration and Nationality Act uses mandatory language -- the word "shall" -- requiring USCIS to adjudicate asylum applications within 180 days, naturalization applications within 120 days, and employment authorization applications on specific regulatory timelines. Congress did not give USCIS a pause button. The agency simply invented one and used it on millions of people.
The court also found that Section 202 of the INA prohibits nationality-based discrimination for green card applicants. What USCIS did was not just procedurally improper. It was textually prohibited.
And then there were the Administrative Procedure Act failures. The court found no rational connection between the two crimes cited in the USCIS memo justifying the freeze and the decision to halt adjudications for 39 countries plus all asylum applications worldwide. The agency ignored the serious reliance interests of people who had built lives, careers, and families in reasonable expectation that their applications would be processed. The national security justification, the court found, was pretextual.
Trump himself said at a rally that he was pausing migration from "hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries." Judge McConnell quoted that directly. He was not impressed by the government's claim that the policies were neutral national security measures.
What This Looked Like on the Ground
I want to be clear about what that freeze actually meant for real people, because the clinical legal language can obscure it.
People showed up to naturalization ceremonies they had been working toward for years, sometimes over a decade, and were turned away because of where they were born. Not because of anything they did. Not because of any finding about their individual case. Because of their birthplace.
Work authorization documents expired while applications sat untouched. Legal status eroded while USCIS collected fees and did nothing. Afghan allies who came to this country after years of service were told, in effect, that what happened at a Metro station meant their cases could not move forward. The court put it plainly: "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 Cato Institute testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that USCIS had collected over one billion dollars in application fees from more than two million applications it was refusing to process. Senator John Kennedy, not known for sympathizing with immigration advocates, was reportedly shocked. That tells you something.
Why This Matters Beyond Today
I have been practicing immigration law long enough to know that a court win is not always the end of the road. The administration can appeal. It can find new legal theories. It can slow-walk compliance. None of that is off the table.
But what this ruling does is establish, in 135 pages of careful legal analysis, that what USCIS did was not a defensible policy choice. It was not a gray area. It was a violation of the statutes Congress passed, the regulations agencies adopted, and the constitutional norms that are supposed to constrain government action regardless of who is in power.
The judge wrote: "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.'"
Those of you who have followed immigration politics over the last year know that "follow the law" and "do things the right way" are phrases that get used to dismiss immigrants who are trying to navigate an impossible system. It was striking to see a federal judge turn that language around and apply it directly to the agency that has spent years saying it.
What Happens Next
The ruling requires the administration to resume processing applications and reschedule naturalization ceremonies that were canceled. If you or a client had a case frozen under one of these policies, that case should now move. That does not mean it will move quickly, and it does not mean the government will not find other ways to create delay. Document everything. Keep following up.
If you are an attorney with clients affected by the freeze, this ruling covers the global asylum hold, the 39-country benefits hold, the re-review policy, and the country-specific factors policy. It is a nationwide vacatur, not a circuit-limited injunction.
If you are an individual with a pending case, talk to an immigration attorney. This ruling is good news, but you need someone who knows your specific facts to advise you on next steps.
