Judge orders Trump administration to resume immigration processing for 39 countries

A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to restart immigration processing for applicants from 39 countries, saying the government had no excuse for failing to follow his earlier ruling immediately. The clash turned a routine benefits fight into a separation-of-powers test, with the court forcing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to move after the agency had frozen asylum adjudications and other immigration cases.

U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. issued the original ruling on June 5, 2026, striking down several Trump administration immigration policies that had paused asylum adjudications and other immigration-benefit processing for people on the administration’s travel-ban list. He said the policies were arbitrary and capricious and that USCIS lacked statutory authority for such a broad pause. The affected immigrants had already filed the required paperwork, paid fees, completed biometrics and attended interviews, yet their cases were left in what McConnell called “indeterminate legal limbo.”

The benefits caught in the freeze included asylum, green cards, work permits and citizenship applications. USCIS had first paused asylum processing for all nationalities, then partially lifted that pause in March 2026 for most people while keeping it in place for nationals of the 39 countries. The case was brought in Rhode Island by labor unions and immigration advocacy groups on behalf of immigrants whose applications had stalled.

The policy shift followed the November 2025 shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. One of the men charged in the attack, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who was granted asylum in 2025. The administration used that episode to justify a wider immigration crackdown, but McConnell’s ruling said the government had gone beyond its legal authority.

By June 12, McConnell said the administration still had not begun processing again. He reminded officials that vacated agency policies take immediate effect and wrote that there was “no excuse” for noncompliance. That left the administration with a choice between full compliance and a narrower, more reluctant reading of the court order, while thousands of immigrants from the 39-country list waited for cases that had already cleared the basic administrative hurdles.