Judge Vacates USCIS 39-Country Pause

A federal judge in Rhode Island has struck down four U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policies that, since December 2025, had frozen the processing of immigration benefits — green cards, work permits, naturalization, and asylum — for nationals of 39 countries the Trump administration had named in expanded travel restrictions.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island issued the ruling on June 5, 2026 in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, a 135-page opinion that vacated the policies as facially unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act and ordered relief nationwide. The court found the policies were adopted without notice-and-comment, exceeded the agency’s statutory authority, and treated nationality as a “significant negative factor” in adjudications in a manner Congress never authorized.

The decision is the most significant federal-court rebuke yet of the country-based adjudication pauses USCIS imposed late last year — and it arrives at a moment when the legal architecture for nationwide remedies is itself in flux.

The opinion strikes down four interlocking USCIS directives that, together, brought benefits processing for affected populations to a near-halt:

• The Benefits Hold Policy froze adjudication of green-card applications, employment authorization documents, and other immigration benefits for nationals of approximately 39 countries subject to expanded travel restrictions.
• The Global Asylum Hold Policy halted processing of affirmative asylum claims across the agency’s asylum offices, regardless of country of origin.
• The Comprehensive Re-Review Policy required USCIS officers to re-examine previously approved benefits granted to applicants from the travel-ban countries, opening already-issued green cards and work permits to renewed scrutiny.
• A fourth directive instructed adjudicators to weigh nationality from the listed countries as a “significant negative factor” in discretionary determinations.

The plaintiffs — led by the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, a refugee resettlement organization, and represented by Democracy Forward, the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Muslim Advocates, and the South Asian American Justice Collaborative — argued the policies violated the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and constitutional equal-protection guarantees.

The court did not issue a preliminary injunction. It vacated the rules themselves — relief authorized under 5 U.S.C. § 706(2) of the Administrative Procedure Act, which directs reviewing courts to “set aside agency action” found to be arbitrary, capricious, or in excess of statutory authority.

That distinction — between injunctive and vacatur relief — is central to why this ruling matters beyond the District of Rhode Island.

Until last summer, district courts routinely issued universal injunctions that bound the federal government nationwide. The Supreme Court substantially limited that practice in Trump v. CASA, Inc., 6-3, decided June 27, 2025, in which Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority held that the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not authorize federal courts to enjoin executive-branch policies as to nonparties.

But the CASA majority pointedly did not resolve whether courts retain authority to vacate agency action under APA § 706. Footnote 10 of the opinion left the question open. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence went further: he wrote that under the APA “plaintiffs may ask a court to preliminarily ‘set aside’ a new agency rule” — language consistent with his 2024 concurrence in Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

In the months since CASA, district courts in the First, Ninth, and other circuits — including district courts in Rhode Island, Illinois, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Pennsylvania — have continued to vacate agency rules nationwide under APA § 706, treating the question Footnote 10 reserved as settled in favor of vacatur authority.

Chief Judge McConnell’s ruling fits that emerging post-CASA consensus. By vacating the policies rather than enjoining their enforcement, the court reached for the remedy the Supreme Court has not, so far, foreclosed.

The Department of Justice is widely expected to seek a stay pending appeal from Chief Judge McConnell, then from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and, if necessary, from the Supreme Court. The government has spent eighteen months arguing in courts across the country that nationwide vacatur under APA § 706 should be unavailable — that any judicial remedy should be party-specific or class-wide.

Immigration attorneys litigating parallel cases say that argument cuts in both directions for an administration that has itself sought nationwide relief in friendly forums.

Hacking, whose St. Louis–based firm has filed parallel litigation in the District of Massachusetts on behalf of approximately 200 plaintiffs harmed by the same USCIS policies, told viewers of his live show on June 6 that agency compliance is the next pressure point.

USCIS has not yet publicly stated how it will implement the order. The agency has historically taken weeks to months to update internal adjudication guidance after adverse APA rulings, even where district courts order immediate compliance.

The plaintiffs in Dorcas are organizational — refugee-serving nonprofits that, the court accepted, suffered concrete harm because their clients could no longer obtain timely adjudications. The ruling does not, by its own terms, confer benefits on any individual applicant; it eliminates the unlawful policy that was holding their cases up.

In practice, that means:

• Affirmative asylum applications previously frozen under the Global Asylum Hold should move back into the regular interview queue, subject to USCIS staffing capacity.
• Adjustment-of-status applications and EAD requests held under the Benefits Hold Policy should return to normal processing, though applicants from the listed countries are still subject to ordinary statutory eligibility analysis.
• Re-review of previously approved benefits should stop, removing the overhang of revocation for green-card and EAD holders from affected countries.

Important caveats remain. The ruling does not address the May 21, 2026 USCIS policy memorandum on adjustment of status (PM-602-0199), which directs officers to treat I-485 approvals as discretionary and extraordinary across the board. That memorandum is the subject of a separate, planned legal challenge.

Nor does the ruling speak to the CHNV parole-termination posture, which was resolved in the government’s favor at the Supreme Court in May 2025 when the Court stayed a preliminary injunction in Doe v. Noem out of the District of Massachusetts.

For now, applicants from the 39 affected countries — and their attorneys — are watching for two things: agency compliance, and whether a higher court will stay the vacatur while the appeal proceeds.