BOSTON, April 30 - A federal judge on Thursday ruled that a set of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies that have made it more difficult for nationals of countries on the administration's travel-ban lists to obtain green cards and work permits are discriminatory and unlawful.
U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick issued a preliminary injunction in a suit brought by about 200 individuals from 20 countries, including Iran, Haiti, Venezuela and Syria. The plaintiffs challenged a series of steps taken by USCIS beginning in November that affected applications for asylum, lawful permanent residence and employment authorization.
The litigation, filed in December, centers on a November 2025 USCIS policy that explicitly treated the nationality of applicants from the 39 countries subject to full or partial travel bans as a "significant negative factor" when adjudicating immigration-related requests. After adopting that policy, the agency then placed an effective hold on processing applications from people from those same 39 countries.
Judge Kobick, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, concluded that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in proving the nationality-based policy violated the Immigration and Nationality Act's prohibition on discrimination based on nationality. The court found that the agency's later decision to pause review of asylum and naturalization applications was "contrary to Congress's command that the agency issue decisions on such applications."
The judge also determined that halting review of green card and work-authorization applications ran afoul of the regulations that govern those processes. As a result, Kobick barred USCIS from applying the challenged policies to 22 plaintiffs who had submitted declarations describing how they were harmed by the agency's actions.
In addition to issuing the injunction for those 22 individuals, the judge instructed the parties to confer on whether the scope of her order should be extended to cover the remainder of the approximately 200 plaintiffs in the case.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Jim Hacking, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, praised the decision. He said the ruling appears to be the first at the national level to address both the "significant negative factor" policy and the related pause in processing applications. Mr. Hacking noted that a handful of other judges have previously ruled against the processing halt in some individual migrants' cases.
In court, Hacking argued that USCIS seeks to make it more difficult for people from the 39 designated countries to obtain immigration benefits, despite there being no congressional authorization for such a nationality-based approach. The judge's preliminary injunction prevents USCIS from enforcing the policies against the specific plaintiffs covered by her order while the litigation proceeds.
The case remains active, with the court's instruction to the parties indicating further litigation over whether broader relief should be granted to the larger group of plaintiffs. The injunction halts enforcement of the challenged policies for the named individuals and frames the next stage of litigation around whether comparable relief should apply to the full set of plaintiffs who brought the suit.