Tòa án liên bang hủy bỏ lệnh đóng băng quy (Jun 2026)

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island granted summary judgment on June 5, 2026, in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, No. 1:26-cv-00132 (D.R.I.). His 135-page order vacated all four challenged USCIS policies — the Global Hold, the Benefits Hold, the Comprehensive Re-Review, and the Country-Specific Factors policy — declaring each unlawful under the .

Unlike earlier preliminary-injunction wins in other federal districts, which protected only the named plaintiffs, McConnell chose of the underlying policies themselves. Vacatur dissolves the policy entirely; no one from any of the 39 affected countries faces a categorical adjudication hold from these memoranda going forward.

USCIS derives its authority to adjudicate immigration benefits from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act, which consolidated all U.S. immigration law into a single statute for the first time. President Truman vetoed the bill, calling its national-origins quota system discriminatory, but Congress overrode him. INA § 208 established the statutory basis for asylum adjudications; INA § 245 covers adjustment of status to permanent residence. Neither section gives the agency authority to impose a categorical freeze on entire nationalities based on a presidential entry proclamation.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow implemented the freeze through two internal policy memoranda. PM-602-0192, issued December 2, 2025, suspended all asylum interview scheduling and froze every immigration benefit application for nationals of 19 countries designated high-risk under Presidential Proclamation 10949. PM-602-0194, issued January 1, 2026, expanded the freeze to all 39 countries covered by the travel ban under Proclamation 10998.

That second memorandum also directed USCIS to conduct a Comprehensive Re-Review of immigration benefits already approved on or after January 20, 2021 — meaning green cards and work permits that applicants had already received could be reopened and revoked. The Country-Specific Factors policy further told adjudicators to treat an applicant's nationality from one of the 39 countries as a negative discretionary factor in any benefit decision.

The 39 countries span four continents. The original December 2025 list covered Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burma (Myanmar), Chad, Republic of the Congo, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Yemen. The January 2026 expansion added 20 more nations including Angola, Benin, Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Tonga, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

For every national of those countries already living in the United States, the freeze reached work-permit renewals (Form I-765), green card adjustment-of-status applications (Form I-485), H-1B petitions (Form I-129), immigrant petitions (Form I-140), and naturalization applications (Form N-400). Applicants spent months without legal status, without work authorization, and without any ability to plan their futures, according to court findings in the 135-page ruling.

The court found four distinct APA violations, each independently sufficient to void the policies. First, USCIS claimed statutory and regulatory authority it doesn't possess: no provision of the INA gave the agency power to impose a categorical hold on all benefit adjudications for entire nationalities based on a presidential entry proclamation aimed at visa issuance, a separate legal authority.

Second, USCIS failed to provide the reasoned explanation the APA demands. The agency couldn't explain, with actual evidence, how freezing green cards and work permits for people already in the United States served the national-security goals of a proclamation restricting new entries. McConnell found the agency's rationale 'arbitrary and capricious' on its face.

Third, the court found USCIS ignored the reliance interests of applicants who had been waiting months or years, some of whom had already received approvals that were then reopened under the re-review policy. The APA requires agencies to at least acknowledge and weigh those interests when changing course; the memoranda contained no such analysis.

Fourth, McConnell found the national security justification pretextual. He cited derogatory statements about immigrants made by administration officials after a National Guard shooting in 2025 as evidence of anti-immigrant animus driving the policies. The court declined to reach the plaintiffs' Fifth Amendment due-process and equal-protection claims, finding the APA grounds fully sufficient — a doctrine called constitutional avoidance.

The lead plaintiff, Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, has resettled refugees and served immigrants in Providence for more than 100 years. It is one of only three agencies in Rhode Island authorized by the U.S. Department of State to resettle arriving refugees. Dorcas filed suit on March 5, 2026, alongside a broad coalition that included the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Auto Workers (UAW), African Communities Together, Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, and several other immigrant service organizations.

Democracy Forward, Lawyers' Committee for Rhode Island, RAICES, Muslim Advocates, and the South Asian American Justice Collaborative represented the coalition. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, stated after the ruling: "The federal government can't shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from."

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, confirmed by the Senate 54-45 on March 23, 2026, is the named defendant responsible for implementing or unwinding the struck policies. Mullin replaced Kristi Noem, who was DHS secretary when the December 2025 freeze memoranda were issued. The ruling doesn't lift the underlying travel ban itself or restrict how consular officers process new visa applications abroad. It erases only the internal USCIS adjudication mechanisms that the agency used to translate the travel-ban proclamations into a domestic-benefits freeze.

Before the June 5 ruling, USCIS had already carved out one exception: on April 30, 2026, it lifted the hold on applications associated with medical physicians, citing its internal review process. That carve-out covered a narrow occupational category and left hundreds of thousands of other applicants still frozen.

The ruling's reach is wider than any preliminary injunction issued in earlier USCIS-hold cases. As of June 2026, 47 federal cases were actively challenging the adjudication pause in courts across the country. Most had produced only injunctions protecting the named plaintiffs. Vacatur is a remedy that wipes the policy from existence: the government can't enforce a vacated rule against anyone, anywhere, until a higher court stays or reverses the order. The government didn't immediately announce whether it would seek a stay from the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Administrative Procedure Act, enacted in 1946 as a hard-fought compromise after a decade of battles over New Deal agency power, requires federal agencies to follow for significant policy changes, provide reasoned explanations for their decisions, and consider the reliance interests of those affected. Courts apply 'arbitrary-and-capricious review' under 5 U.S.C. § 706, asking whether the agency examined relevant data and articulated a satisfactory explanation. Before the APA, no federal law governed how agencies made decisions.

The APA has become the primary legal lever in challenges to Trump administration immigration policies, used in courts across the country to block or narrow asylum restrictions, deportation practices, and visa-processing changes throughout 2025 and 2026. McConnell's decision stands out because vacatur doesn't require ongoing court supervision and can't be easily worked around by reissuing the same policy under a different name.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that often supports reduced government regulation, published analysis after the ruling agreeing that the USCIS freeze violated the law. Cato's immigration policy director David Bier wrote that DHS froze legal immigration for tens of thousands of people already living in the United States, not foreign nationals seeking new entry, and that the agency lacked any statutory basis for doing so. The Cato analysis noted that 72 percent of the administration's immigration reductions under the second Trump term targeted legal pathways — family visas, H-1Bs, green cards — rather than unauthorized entry.

Milagro Sique, CEO of Dorcas International, said in a statement: "On behalf of the thousands of immigrants we serve, we are grateful to Judge McConnell for his ruling. These policies were wrong, plain and simple... Having the judicial process work as intended — by upholding the rule of law — gives us some reassurance."

Tòa án liên bang hủy bỏ lệnh đóng băng quy trình xét duyệt tị nạn của USCIS đối với 39 quốc gia