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The Trump administration unlawfully barred applicants from 39 travel-ban countries from receiving decisions on asylum, work permits, green cards, and citizenship applications, a US federal judge ruled on Friday.

The decision came on the same day that the US Senate voted to pass legislation to fund Donald Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown.

Chief US district judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, ruled that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) had adopted a series of unlawful policies targeting people from 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries.

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

Those measures placed a hold on processing immigration benefit applications from people in the 39 countries subject to Trump’s full or partial travel bans, which he has justified on vetting and security grounds. Green cards grant foreign nationals permanent resident status in the US.

The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

The judge 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, adding: “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.”

The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) applauded the judge’s decision.

“Every person seeking safety, stability, and opportunity deserves a fair chance to have their case heard under the law. Today, a federal judge reaffirmed what we already knew: that the Trump administration violated the law, and did so with anti-immigrant malice. By shutting down access to asylum and preventing thousands of immigrants from receiving a decision on their immigration applications solely on the basis of which country they come from, the Trump administration acted against statute and against the rule of law,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of NYIC, in a statement. “Their unlawful actions left thousands of families in limbo, cut people from life-saving protections, and undermined the rule of law by attempting to bypass the immigration system established by Congress.”

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Travelers in a waiting area at Kabul international airport in Afghanistan on 2 October 2024. Photograph: Francois LOCHON/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

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