James' World 2

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Key Takeaways

• Research shows that college graduates could be haunted by a weak job market in the form of reduced earnings and employment opportunities.
• Unemployment for 22‑ to 27‑year‑old college grads is around 5.6 percent, noticeably higher than in recent years and unusually elevated relative to the broader workforce.
• More than 40% of employed recent graduates are working in jobs that do not require a college degree, the highest share since 2020.

Today’s class of college graduates is entering one of the weakest labor markets in years, and research suggests that those early setbacks could echo through their earnings and careers for at least a decade. 

According to a recent report from The New York Times, recent college graduates are stepping into the most challenging job market since the depths of the pandemic. An analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that unemployment among 22- to 27-year-old college graduates has increased over the past three years, reaching 5.6% in the first quarter of the year. 

That’s above the 4.2% overall jobless rate. College graduates usually enjoy lower unemployment than the broader workforce, so the current gap is a sign that entry-level hiring has weakened disproportionately. 

At the same time, underemployment has surged. More than 40% of employed recent graduates are in roles that do not typically require a college degree, the highest level since 2020, per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

“The overall labor market is not in a recession right now,” Larry Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, told the Times. “But it’s clearly feeling like a recession for young college graduates entering the labor market.”

Economists told the Times that the tough job market means graduates are likely to earn less and face more challenges in advancing their careers. Research has repeatedly found that the year a worker leaves college, and the state of the economy at that moment, can shape how much they earn in the long term.

One study examined the effects of a weak job market on wages 

One influential study by Lisa Kahn, an economist at the University of Rochester, examined what happened to students who graduated around the deep recession of the early 1980s, following them for many years before, during and after that downturn. 

She compared them to cohorts who were otherwise similar, but who entered the labor market under very different macroeconomic conditions, when the economy was a little better. 

Khan’s core finding was that graduating from college when unemployment is high and jobs are scarce has a clear, measurable and long-lasting negative impact on wages. 

New graduates who started their careers in that weak labor market accepted lower‑paying jobs than they likely would have in better times, and those smaller paychecks did not simply snap back when the economy recovered. Instead, their earnings grew from a lower base, so even as conditions improved, the initial penalty continued to linger.

Fifteen years after graduation, workers who entered the job market during the downturn were still earning less, on average, than similar peers who began their careers in healthier job markets. 

Now Kahn warns that the current group of college graduates could be haunted by a weak job market in the form of reduced earnings and employment opportunities. 

“There are going to be lasting effects,” Kahn told the Times. “The cohorts that were lucky enough to just finish a little bit earlier or a little bit later I think are going to be doing better.”

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Young graduates are entering the toughest hiring climate since the pandemic

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When Jeffrey Epstein wanted his favorite Zweigle’s Pop Open hot dogs ferried from his townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to his sprawling Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, he did what any exceedingly rich person might.

He had his staff reach out to a close friend with a private jet. Stephen Hanson, then head of a Manhattan restaurant empire that at its peak served more than 20,000 people a day at 25 theatrical, high-volume restaurants like Blue Water Grill, Dos Caminos, and Ruby Foo’s, was happy to make the delivery himself.

“In the white freezer in downstairs kitchen of 71st street, there are packages of frozen hot dogs,” Mr. Epstein’s private chef emailed an assistant. “JE would like to have hot dogs for lunch tmrw and these are the new dogs he likes.”

There was one other favor Mr. Epstein wanted on that August weekend in 2012. He asked Mr. Hanson to make room for a woman who would be bringing a wallet he’d left behind, according to documents the Department of Justice collected as it investigated Mr. Epstein. She was later paid settlements from funds established for Mr. Epstein’s victims.

The Justice Department files attest to Mr. Epstein’s transactional relationships with many powerful men. Billionaires like the Victoria’s Secret magnate Les Wexner and the private equity investor Leon Black helped build his fortune. Boldfaced names like Woody Allen and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince, provided cachet and social access.

What Mr. Hanson offered, a review of the thousands of emails and texts the two men exchanged over a decade, shows was access to the world of food and hospitality — as well as a wingman who enjoyed the company of attractive women, and had the means to help manage and entertain them.

Mr. Hanson got the young women tables in his dining rooms. He arranged cooking classes for them. When Mr. Epstein asked him to help women land visas or find jobs in his restaurants, the answer was almost always yes.

During their long friendship, Mr. Hanson became one of the most powerful people in the restaurant business. In 2003, Bon Appétit magazine named him restaurateur of the year, and he expanded his reach to Las Vegas. By 2007, his company, BR Guest Hospitality, was valued at $300 million.

Mr. Hanson still found time, the files show, to aid his friend in all kinds of ways. He recruited people to manage Mr. Epstein’s private Caribbean island compound and set up tastings to help him hire the perfect private chef. No errand was too small. When the beef jerky that fueled one of Mr. Epstein’s odd dietary binges didn’t taste quite right, Mr. Hanson worked on the recipe. He even had his executive assistant send a sample to a laboratory to test its nutritional value.

Nothing in the files or other public records indicates that Mr. Hanson had sex with minors, as Mr. Epstein did. In a video interview in 2021, a victim of Mr. Epstein’s told the F.B.I. that a decade earlier, when she was in her early 20s, Mr. Epstein had sent the restaurateur to her New York City apartment, where Mr. Hanson paid her for oral sex at least a dozen times.

The woman, who first met Mr. Epstein when she was 17, said she had become dependent on Mr. Epstein and did whatever he requested. Her name was redacted in the files, and her lawyer, Gloria Allred, declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman would not say whether the agency had investigated further, but Mr. Hanson has never been charged with a crime.

In response to questions for this article, Mr. Hanson did not address the woman’s allegations, but issued a brief statement through his lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, a former attorney for Mr. Epstein. “Mr. Epstein knew and relied upon Mr. Hanson for advice on certain matters given Mr. Hanson’s hospitality industry experience,” it read in part. “Mr. Epstein was adept at deception and manipulation. He pulled the wool over the eyes of leading academics, scientists, and titans of business. The suggestion, assumption, or insinuation that there was anything untoward about, in relation to, or concerning, any connection between Mr. Hanson and Mr. Epstein is untrue.”

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The bond between Stephen Hanson, left, and Jeffrey Epstein stretched over decades, a review of Department of Justice files shows. It included vacations like this 2013 trip to Las Vegas. Credit…U.S. Department of Justice

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The first case of the New World screwworm in a U.S. cow in about 60 years has been detected, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed yesterday. It is the first instance of the agricultural pest in cattle since it was eliminated in the U.S. in 1966.

Screwworms are parasitic flies that lays their eggs in open wounds or cuts or in the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, or genitals of warm-blooded animals—including humans. The maggots hatch and burrow through the skin, causing painful, foul-smelling wounds.

Livestock in the southern U.S. and Mexico suffered devastating screwworm outbreaks in the first half of the 20th century. But the parasite was eliminated in those nations thanks to a wildly successful effort called the sterile insect technique, which involved the release of sterile flies in Panama that caused the fly population to collapse.

Yet the New World screwworm remained endemic to the Caribbean and South America, where, in 2005, it was estimated to cause annual economic losses of around $6.1 billion in today’s dollars. And in recent years, the fly has been spreading northward through Central America. Experts had been warning that it was only a matter of time before it arrived in the U.S.

The new infection was detected in a three-week-old calf in Zavala County, Texas; it was found in the calf’s umbilical area, according to the USDA.

“Protecting our livestock industry is a national security issue of the utmost importance, and USDA is wasting no time in taking action,” said Dudley Hoskins, the agency’s undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, in a statement. “The United States has defeated this pest before, and we will do it again.”

USDA and Texas officials are taking “immediate action” to contain the threat, according to the statement. Efforts include forming an incident command team with the Texas Animal Health Commission, establishing a 20-kilometer perimeter around the site of the infection with quarantines and movement controls, releasing sterile New World screwworm flies from the ground and the air, trapping flies along the border, screening wildlife in the area, and doing outreach in local communities.

People who live around Zavala County should check their pets or livestock for signs of an infection—for example, draining or growing wounds and screwworm maggots and eggs in or around body openings, the USDA says. If they suspect an infection, people should contact their state animal health official or local USDA veterinarian.

New World screwworms rarely infect humans, but they can infect people who live in or travel to areas where the flies are endemic. People who spend a lot of time outside and have open wounds are most at risk. Anyone who suspects they may have an infection should seek immediate medical care. People should not try to remove maggots themselves—a health care provider may need to remove them surgically, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To prevent infection, the CDC advises keeping wounds clean and covered, sleeping indoors with closed windows or screens, and using insect repellant or wearing long-sleeved clothing.

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Key Points

• Colorectal cancer diagnoses are rising among younger people, and new research suggests that early-life exposure to colibactin, a toxin produced by certain E. coli strains, may contribute to this trend.
• Researchers found that colibactin-related mutations were 3.3 times more common in early-onset colorectal cancer cases than in late-onset cases.
• Researchers are continuing to study how childhood microbiome factors, including exposure to colibactin-producing bacteria, may influence colorectal cancer risk later in life.

Colorectal cancer, which the Cancer Research Institute explained was “once considered a disease of older age,” is skyrocketing among younger people. According to the institute, 1 in 5 diagnoses now occurs in someone under 55, and the disease is quickly becoming “a leading cause of cancer-related death in young people.” While a number of factors are at play, one study suggests that E. coli could play a major role. 

In 2025, researchers led by a team at the University of California, San Diego published their study in the journal Nature, which outlined how colibactin, a toxin produced by certain strains of E. coli that appears to damage DNA early in childhood, could be fueling this colon cancer crisis.

To identify this connection, the team examined the colorectal cancer genomes of 981 patients with either early- or late-onset colon cancer. They found that colibactin-related mutations were 3.3 times more common in patients with early-onset colon cancer than in those with late-onset.

“These mutation patterns are a kind of historical record in the genome, and they point to early-life exposure to colibactin as a driving force behind early-onset disease,” said Ludmil Alexandrov, the study’s senior author and a professor in the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego, in a press release. “If someone acquires one of these driver mutations by the time they’re 10 years old,” he added, “they could be decades ahead of schedule for developing colorectal cancer, getting it at age 40 instead of 60.”

Alexandrov also explained to NPR that the team found colibactin mutations were far less common in places like rural Africa and Asia, but turned up more often in the U.S. and Western Europe. That, he added, could be due to a number of factors, including the use of antibiotics and childhood nutrition choices, as well as whether someone was breastfed and how they were delivered, either by cesarean section or vaginal delivery. 

“All of these factors are known to substantially affect the microbiome, and there is some evidence they may impact this [colibactin-producing] bacteria, but we really need to investigate each one carefully,” the researcher said. 

It’s important to note that if you do contract this particular strain and have this particular toxin in your body, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get colon cancer.

“We don’t have definitive data on whether having the toxin means you will definitely get young-onset colorectal cancer: this study only looked at cancers themselves, not at the bowels of healthy people without cancer,” Trevor Graham, a professor of genomics and evolution and director of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at The Institute of Cancer Research, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement. “So, it’s quite possible that [this certain] E. coli are very common and only a few people with the ‘bad bugs’ will actually go on to get bowel cancer.”

Graham added, “I think it is very likely cancer only occurs in some cases, because even though someone might have the ‘bad bugs’ that cause mutations, those bugs have to cause the right mutations to make a cancer grow.” 

While this strain of E. coli may be a player in the game, it’s only a piece of the ever-growing colorectal puzzle. The Cancer Research Institute noted that several risk factors are at play, not the least of which is genetics. There are, however, things the institute said you can control, including your lifestyle.

“A diet high in processed and red meats and low in fiber, fruits, and vegetables is associated with increased colorectal cancer risk,” the Institute said. It cited The World Cancer Research Fund’s recommendations to limit red meat to 12–18 ounces per week and minimize processed meats to reduce your risk. Additionally, you may want to cut back on alcohol, as the institute also said that “heavy alcohol consumption” can increase risk.

For now, Alexandrov said in the statement that the team is continuing to investigate the issue and exploring whether probiotics could eliminate these and other harmful bacterial strains. The team is also developing early-detection tests that analyze stool samples for colibactin-related mutations and continues to monitor how colorectal cancers are evolving around the world to better understand what we can control in cancer risk. “This reshapes how we think about cancer,” he said. “It might not be just about what happens in adulthood — cancer could potentially be influenced by events in early life, perhaps even the first few years. Sustained investment in this type of research will be critical to the global effort to prevent and treat cancer before it’s too late.”

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Israeli security forces in Kochav Yair, Israel, on Sunday, after a shooting. Credit…Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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“Universal” biological signatures of aging shared across different mammalian species—including humans—could offer new clues to identifying longevity and antiaging treatments or interventions, a new study finds.

Age isn’t just the number of candles on a cake. That’s a representation of your chronological age, while your “biological age” is a measure of how your body’s various tissues and cells are holding up over time—and the two don’t necessarily match. Instead, your biological age may be higher or lower than your chronological age for several reasons, such as your lifestyle choices, a chronic disease if you have one, your genes, and more. Researchers use molecular “clocks” to estimate biological age, such as by looking at changes to our DNA. But some of these biomarkers don’t help explain why aging is occurring.

In the new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed more than 11,000 “transcriptomes”—collections of RNA transcripts that show which genes are being turned on or off in any given cell or tissue at any given time—across various tissues in mice, rats, monkeys, and humans.

What they found was that biological hallmarks of aging in different tissues appear to be highly conserved, meaning they are shared across species, says Alexander Tyshkovskiy, the paper’s lead author and a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “The same genes are associated with aging in, for example, liver and heart in rats and humans,” he says.

The hallmarks of aging carried across individual cell types, too, such as liver or blood cells. “Even though the cells have very different functions, very different origin, they still share the same aging-related biomarkers,” Tyshkovskiy adds.

The researchers call this type of aging one’s “transcriptomic age.” Both humans and animals with chronic diseases had a higher transcriptomic age, the researchers found, suggesting it reflects higher levels of cellular damage. And using a large dataset from the U.K. Biobank, the team found that proteins associated with some universal biomarkers also appear to correlate with disease and mortality.*

Overall, the results suggest that aging seems to be a “very systemic process” that affects different tissues, cell types, and species in similar ways, Tyshkovskiy says.

The study is a “major advance,” says David Sinclair, a professor at the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School, who has long studied longevity. Sinclair was not involved with the study.

“[The authors] developed transcriptomic clocks that don’t just estimate age; they measure the progressive loss of cellular function and predict biological decline and mortality risk across mammals,” Sinclair says. The findings could help researchers understand “the underlying process of aging itself, not just the passage of time.”

Tyshkovskiy and his colleagues hope the results will one day lead to potential treatments to slow aging in humans. To that end, the team has developed an online tool called “Transcriptomic Age Calculator Online,” or TACO, to enable other researchers to predict the age of tissue samples using RNA data they may have already collected. For instance, if a researcher has collected tissue from one animal model that was treated with a drug and from another that was not treated, the scientist can measure changes in the biological age between the samples “regardless of the tissue [and] regardless of the species,” says Vadim Gladyshev, the study’s senior author and a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The project could help narrow down possible longevity treatments. “Currently in humans, we don’t have a single intervention that extends lifespan,” Gladyshev says. “We think, using these tools, we could identify candidates that can be tested in the future, and maybe some of them will extend lifespan. That is the hope.”

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Police in Ohio are hunting for what are believed to be multiple suspects after a shooting near a festival in Toledo wounded 12 people.

Officers responded around 5:40 p.m. local time to a report about a person shot near Toledo’s Old West End Festival, a two-day event featuring food markets and live music.

“It appears as though there were at least two shooters,” Toledo Deputy Police Chief Joe Heffernan said at a press conference Saturday. “I think they were probably shooting at each other, and what ended up happening was 12 people were struck with bullets.”

Two individuals were wounded critically, Heffernan said. The victims ranged in age from 14 to 61, but were largely in their early 20s, police said. The suspect or suspects remain at large, the deputy chief added.

The police department did not release the identities of the victims.

Officers are reviewing video footage, interviewing individuals impacted by the shooting, and have gathered evidence from the scene of the crime.

“As far as violence, this is over the top,” Lieutenant Dan Gerken of the Toledo police said at the press conference, describing it as one of the worst incidents he’d seen in his career.

Those near the festival also described the chaotic scenes, some of which have been shared on social media.

“We were walking to our car and walked through the corner where it occurred, and my wife said we need to go now,” John Beatrice, who was at the festival around the time of the shooting, told The Independent in a Facebook message. “Unfortunately, we didn’t see the events, other than hearing the gunshots and commotion behind us as we hurried towards our vehicle and made our way out of the area.”

“I was very close to the scene driving,” Facebook user Bob Grand Lubell wrote in response to the TPD’s announcement of the shooting. “It was packed with teenagers at 5:00. Before the shooting, the police presence was very heavy. Still, not enough.”

“I am deeply concerned about the situation in Toledo tonight,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said on X. “Summer festivals should be safe spaces for families to spend time together without fear of violence. Fran and I are praying for everyone impacted by the incident at the Old West End Festival, and we are confident that law enforcement will locate the suspects involved in this senseless crime.”

Witness Kevin Berry told the Associated Press that the event was the “kick-off to Toledo’s summer festival season.”

Police are asking members of the public to avoid the area, and to report any information to Crime Stoppers at 419-255-1111.

The Independent has contacted the TPD and Lubell for comment.

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“Alex Bores. Wrong on A.I. Wrong for Congress,” one attack ad said.

“Hypocrite,” read another. “Liar,” said one more.

For months, district voters have received a steady barrage of mail, texts, and television spots trained at Mr. Bores, who first joined the State Assembly in 2023 and whose district on the East Side lies inside the congressional district. These messages are part of a multimillion-dollar assault on his candidacy from a super PAC, Leading the Future.

Close to $75 million has flowed to the group from Silicon Valley heavyweights like Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, and Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI. So far, $6.2 million has been spent against Mr. Bores, according to federal filings.

OpenAI’s largest competitor, Anthropic, has argued for more government oversight and a more cautious approach to the development of new A.I. tools. It has backed Mr. Bores from the start, with employees donating at least $186,000 to his campaign.

Far more has flowed to outside groups supporting him. Four super PACs — all with ties to Anthropic or its ideological allies — have spent about $6.5 million defending Mr. Bores or attacking his opponents, according to federal filings.

Chris Larsen, a billionaire crypto investor, spent $3.5 million to help Mr. Bores “when he learned that OpenAI was deliberately targeting” Mr. Bores’s campaign, according to Alex Tourk, a spokesman for Mr. Larsen.

All that money and attention to Mr. Bores has cast a shadow over the race to represent the 12th District, which includes some of New York’s wealthiest neighborhoods: the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, and Midtown Manhattan. Many of his rivals are struggling to compete for attention amid the battle of tech behemoths that has Mr. Bores in the middle.

“I had never heard of him until I saw the ads attacking him,” said Michael Paluszek, a 40-year resident of Stuyvesant Town.

Mr. Paluszek shifted his support from another candidate once he learned more about Mr. Bores, and he plans to volunteer and “own the corner of East 14th Street and Avenue A,” at the district’s southernmost reaches.

“That’s going to be my corner,” he said. “I’m going to compete.”

Mr. Bores said that his interest in A.I. stemmed from his experience working at these companies and his understanding of how they work. He said he had already heard from members of Congress who were excited to work on the issue if he is elected, and he had a stock reply for them: Don’t wait for him.

“I’m not going to be there for eight months,” he said. “Take it. I have no pride of ownership.”

His expertise on the subject will be an asset for Democrats, he said. Despite the assertions of his opponents, he said, his focus as a legislator has never been on giving one company an advantage over another. Sometimes he reads the inflammatory texts the PACs have sent and wonders how they could possibly be ascribed to him.

“A lot of people that come to this from the A.I. safety angle or A.I. regulatory angle, we were the first people to say: ‘Hey, this is really powerful and that’s why we think there needs to be regulation, but it can also be used for good,’” he said.

Mr. Bores did not set out to be an A.I. expert. As a student at Cornell University, Mr. Bores wanted to become a lawyer focused on international trade and labor rights. That remained his goal as he excelled at debate, protested Nike’s use of sweatshops, and won an elected seat on the university’s board of trustees. Friends described Mr. Bores as an intensely focused striver.

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Assemblyman Alex Bores represents a district on Manhattan’s East Side that lies in the 12th Congressional District, where he is running to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler. Credit…Anna Watts for The New York Times

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Just more than a decade ago, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) picked up the signal of something entirely new: a ripple in the fabric of spacetime. About 1.3 billion light-years away, two massive black holes had merged, and the resulting shockwave—a gravitational wave—was strong enough for LIGO to detect the moment it washed over Earth.

Since then, gravitational-wave researchers have focused on fine-tuning their instruments to detect more of these fleeting ripples. Each confirmed, or high-quality candidate event, is added to a running tally in a catalog maintained by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration, a network of four gravitational-wave detectors: the two LIGO stations in the U.S., the Virgo station in Italy, and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan. The newest entries on the collaboration’s list—a record-breaking 161 events spotted between April 2024 and January 2025—have researchers excited for a new era of discovery, an “age of gravitational astronomy.”

“The extraordinary sensitivity of our detectors now allows us to capture three or four gravitational wave signals every week,” said Ed Porter, a researcher at the AstroParticle and Cosmology Laboratory, overseen by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Paris City University, in a statement. “This ever-growing wealth of data, which an entire community of scientists and astronomers is working to analyze and study, has taken us from the era of initial discoveries into that of precision gravitational astronomy.”

These recent weekly signals form about 75 percent of the total number of confirmed gravitational-wave events observed by the LVK network; the total is now up to 390. Having more observations of these unusual cosmic events gives researchers the ability to study phenomena and locales of the universe that are too faint or far away to detect through other methods, as well as to better understand the nature and evolution of black holes and a diverse assortment of other fundamental questions in astrophysics.

Among the exciting findings from the latest batch of gravitational-wave detections are GW240615, for which scientists were able to triangulate the exact location of the event’s source; GW250114, which offered the clearest signal ever recorded, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 76.9; and GW241011 and GW241110, which, scientists say, collectively support the existence of “second-generation black holes” that form solely from the mergers of smaller black holes.

“It is another hint that the Universe may still be hiding important pieces of the story of how black holes are born, evolve, and merge,” said Mario Spera, a Virgo Collaboration researcher at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, in the same statement. “And this picture will become richer, and more surprising, with every new gravitational-wave catalog by LVK.”

The 161 new entries provide enough data to keep scientists busy for years, but the LVK Collaboration says there is a lot more to come—especially as researchers continue optimizing the detectors to make them even more sensitive to spacetime ripples.

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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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