A federal judge in Manhattan has struck down a Trump administration policy that suspended the processing of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, ruling that the sweeping ban exceeded the legal authority granted to the Secretary of State and violated longstanding federal protections against nationality-based discrimination. The ruling delivers an immediate practical impact for families and individuals across nearly 40 percent of the world's nations affected by the suspension.
The Policy That Was Struck Down
The ban took effect in January, when the State Department paused processing immigrant visas for citizens of 75 designated countries spanning virtually every region of the globe, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, Somalia, Thailand, Uruguay and Yemen. The State Department framed the suspension as intended to ensure immigrants from what it called high-risk countries would not become a "public charge," a justification critics argued was pretext for a broad, nationality-based exclusion sweeping in millions of otherwise eligible applicants.
The Court's Reasoning
In her ruling issued Friday, Judge Jeannette Vargas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found the policy "patently unlawful," determining that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had exceeded his statutory authority. Central to her reasoning was Section 1152(a)(1)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which explicitly prohibits discriminating against individuals in immigrant visa issuance based on nationality, place of birth or place of residence. Vargas found the 75-country suspension represented exactly the kind of blanket, nationality-based barrier the statute was designed to prevent.
The Legal Challenge
The lawsuit was filed in February by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and African Communities Together, along with individual plaintiffs affected by the suspension, represented by attorneys from Democracy Forward, the National Immigration Law Center, the Legal Aid Society and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Anna Gallagher of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network welcomed the ruling as a victory centered on keeping families together, while Susan Welber of the Legal Aid Society described the ban as premised on "a fiction" — the unsupported assumption that residents of the 75 targeted nations were inherently more likely to become dependent on public assistance.
Judge Vargas's order vacated any visa denial issued solely under the invalidated policy and directed the State Department to resume evaluating applications on an individualized, case-by-case basis. The ruling follows other setbacks the administration has faced in federal courts this year on immigration matters, including an earlier ruling against an executive order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship, though the administration could still appeal to the Second Circuit.