Introduction

For more than six months, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services refused to issue final decisions on the asylum, work permit, green card, and citizenship applications of people who had done everything the law asks of them. The agency placed an open-ended hold on benefit requests filed by nationals of thirty-nine countries, paused every pending asylum case in the country regardless of where the applicant was born, reopened approvals it had already granted, and instructed its officers to treat a person’s country of origin as a strike against them. The common thread was not anything these applicants had done. It was, as the court later put it, the happenstance of their birth.

On June 5, 2026, the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island brought those policies to an end. Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. held that all four of the challenged policies were unlawful and vacated them, ruling that the agency had claimed authority it did not have, failed to give any reasoned explanation for what it was doing, did not account for the settled expectations of the people it left in limbo, and offered a national-security justification that the court found pretextual. Dorcas Int’l Inst. of R.I. v. U.S. Citizenship & Immigr. Servs., No. 1:26-cv-00132-JJM-PAS, slip op. at 3-4 (D.R.I. June 5, 2026).1

This article explains how the holds came about, why the immigrants and the organizations representing them were able to get into court when the government insisted they could not, the grounds on which the policies failed, the remedy the court chose, and what the decision means in practical terms, both for the issue generally and for the individual applicant waiting on a decision. The point that matters most for the post-Soviet client base this firm serves is easy to miss in the coverage: one of the four policies, the global hold on asylum adjudications, applied to everyone, no matter their nationality.

From the Travel Ban to the Adjudication Holds

The story begins with the President’s authority to suspend the entry of noncitizens. On his first day back in office, the President issued an executive order directing his Cabinet to identify countries whose vetting information was too thin to allow safe admissions. Exec. Order No. 14161, 90 Fed. Reg. 8451 (Jan. 20, 2025). That order led to a proclamation under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) and 8 U.S.C. § 1185(a) restricting the entry of nationals from nineteen countries, Proclamation No. 10949, 90 Fed. Reg. 24497 (June 4, 2025), and then to a second proclamation in December that expanded the list to thirty-nine. Proclamation No. 10998, 90 Fed. Reg. 59717 (Dec. 16, 2025). Readers who want the longer history of the suspension power should see the firm’s comprehensive article on Section 212(f), and, for the last round of travel-ban litigation that reached the Supreme Court, our coverage of Trump v. Hawaii and of the original Proclamation 9645 travel ban.

Section 1182(f) is a power over the border. It lets the President keep people out. It says nothing about how the agency that adjudicates benefits inside the country is to treat the applications of people who are already here. That distinction sits at the center of the case, because what USCIS did next went well beyond the border.

Two incidents supplied the public justification. In June 2025, an Afghan national pleaded guilty to conspiring and attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization in furtherance of a planned Election Day attack.2 In late November 2025, another Afghan national was charged with shooting two members of the National Guard in Washington, D.C., one of whom died.3 In the days that followed, the President made public statements about immigration policy,4 and the then-Secretary of Homeland Security publicly called for a broad entry ban.5 As explained below, the court would later rely on these statements in assessing whether national security was the agency’s actual reason for the holds.

USCIS then issued the guidance that the plaintiffs challenged. A November 2025 policy alert told officers to treat country-specific factors drawn from the travel ban as significant negative factors when exercising discretion. A December 2025 policy memorandum, PM-602-0192, ordered three things at once: a hold on every pending asylum and withholding application nationwide; a hold on all benefit requests from people listed in the travel ban; and a re-review of benefits already approved for travel-ban nationals who entered on or after January 20, 2021. A January 2026 memorandum extended those measures to the countries added by the December proclamation.6 The court grouped the measures into four policies and gave each a name: the Global Asylum Hold Policy, the Benefits Hold Policy, the Comprehensive Re-Review Policy, and the Country-Specific Factors Policy. Slip op. at 19-21.

The practical effect was a wall of silence. Cases could move through processing, but no approval, denial, or dismissal could issue. People sat with filed applications, paid fees, completed biometrics, and attended interviews, and then waited with no decision and no end date in sight. Slip op. at 3.

Getting Into Court

Most of the opinion, and most of the government’s effort, was spent not on whether the policies were lawful but on whether any court could look at them at all. The government raised a stack of threshold defenses. The court rejected each one, and the path it took matters for anyone who may need to bring a similar challenge.

National security is not a magic word

The government argued first that because the policies touched national security, they were off limits to judicial review. The court accepted, as it had to, that the political branches receive real deference on the underlying facts of national security and foreign affairs. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667, 708 (2018). But deference to factual judgments is not immunity from law. Invoking national security does not turn an unlawful policy into a lawful one, and courts routinely review immigration measures, even ones wrapped in security language, to make sure the executive has stayed within its statutory and constitutional bounds. Slip op. at 23-25. The question was not whether the holds were wise. It was whether USCIS had the legal authority to impose them, which is an ordinary judicial question. Slip op. at 25-26.

The INA does not bar a challenge to a policy

The government next argued that the INA strips courts of jurisdiction over decisions about adjustment of status, work permits, and naturalization. See 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(i), (ii). The court drew the line that has long governed this area: the statute bars review of an individual grant or denial, but it does not bar a challenge to a general policy or practice. Slip op. at 28-32 (citing McNary v. Haitian Refugee Ctr., Inc., 498 U.S. 479, 492 (1991)). The plaintiffs were not complaining about one denied application. They were attacking a categorical hold on whole classes of cases. That kind of collateral challenge survives the jurisdictional bar.

The court added a point that disposes of the government’s broader theory. Under Kucana v. Holder, 558 U.S. 233 (2010), the discretion that triggers the jurisdictional bar must be discretion that Congress conferred by statute, not discretion the agency hands itself in a memorandum. USCIS could not insulate its holds from review by declaring in its own guidance that the holds were discretionary. Slip op. at 33-34. And the government’s reliance on the visa-retrogression cases failed because those holds rest on a real condition, the availability of a visa, while these holds had no condition precedent and no stated end. Slip op. at 36-38.

Not committed to agency discretion, and final

The court held that none of the relevant statutes left these decisions to unreviewable agency discretion, because the INA and its regulations supply detailed standards a court can apply. Slip op. at 44-51. Two of those standards do real work later. Asylum applications must be adjudicated within 180 days absent exceptional circumstances, 8 U.S.C. § 1158(d)(5)(A)(iii), the same statutory clock that drives the asylum work-permit timeline the firm has explained in its discussion of the asylum EAD clock and the ABT settlement. Naturalization decisions, in turn, must issue within 120 days of the examination. 8 C.F.R. § 335.3(a). The word the statutes and regulations use is shall, not may, and a duty to decide is not a license to sit forever. The court also found the policies to be final agency action, rejecting the government’s claim that an indefinite hold was merely tentative. Slip op. at 51-60.

Why the Policies Were Unlawful

Having cleared the threshold, the court reached the merits and found two independent problems. The policies were contrary to law, and they were arbitrary and capricious. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2).

Contrary to law

The central legal error was simple. USCIS leaned on the President’s entry-suspension power under Section 1182(f) to justify holding domestic benefit adjudications. But Section 1182(f) is about keeping people out at the border. It does not authorize the agency to stop deciding the applications of people who are already lawfully present and pursuing relief that Congress created. Slip op. at 87-91. Each of the four policies failed for want of statutory footing. The asylum hold collided with the statutory right to apply for asylum and the 180-day adjudication command. The benefits hold and the re-review policy ran past the limits of the adjustment, work-authorization, and naturalization schemes. And the country-specific-factors policy turned national origin into a freestanding negative factor that the statutes do not contemplate. Slip op. at 91-111.

Arbitrary and capricious

Even if the agency had possessed the authority, the court held, the way it acted would still have doomed the policies. An agency must give a reasoned explanation, must weigh the reliance interests of the people its change will upend, and must offer reasons that are genuine rather than pretextual. See Dep’t of Homeland Sec. v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 591 U.S. 1 (2020). In the court’s analysis, USCIS did none of these. The court found no reasoned account of why the two incidents justified holding large numbers of unrelated cases, found that the agency had not addressed the reliance interests of applicants who had ordered their lives around the existing process, and concluded that the public statements surrounding the policy undercut the national-security justification the agency offered. On that record, the court held the security rationale to be pretextual. Slip op. at 112-127. The court grounded that conclusion in the principle that a national-security label cannot serve as a talisman to ward off judicial review.

The Remedy

The court vacated and set aside all four policies and entered a declaratory judgment that they are unlawful. Slip op. at 128-129. Vacatur under the Administrative Procedure Act is not an injunction against a party; it removes the unlawful policies themselves, which is why the court declined to enter a separate permanent injunction as unnecessary. Slip op. at 129-131. The plaintiffs had not moved for summary judgment on their Fifth Amendment due process and equal protection claims, and they expressly reserved them, so those constitutional questions remain open for another day. Slip op. at 21-22, 132-134.

How Far the Ruling Reaches: Vacatur, Nationwide Effect, and Trump v. CASA

A reader who has followed the recent fights over the scope of judicial relief will ask a fair question. How can a single district court set a federal policy aside for the whole country when the Supreme Court has just reined in nationwide relief? The answer turns on a distinction the court was careful to observe. In Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025), the Supreme Court held that universal injunctions, meaning injunctions that forbid the government from enforcing a policy against anyone rather than only the named plaintiffs, generally exceed the equitable authority Congress gave the federal courts in the Judiciary Act of 1789. The firm has traced the roots of that holding in its discussion of Justice Thomas’s concurrence on nationwide injunctions in the earlier travel-ban litigation.

The Rhode Island court did not issue a universal injunction. It set the four policies aside under the Administrative Procedure Act, which directs a reviewing court to hold unlawful and set aside agency action that is contrary to law or arbitrary and capricious, 5 U.S.C. § 706(2), and it entered a declaratory judgment, declining a separate permanent injunction as unnecessary. Slip op. at 128-131. That choice matters, because vacatur and injunction are different remedies. An injunction runs against the named defendants and tells them what they may not do. Vacatur operates on the agency action itself, removing the unlawful policy from the books.

CASA did not decide whether the set-aside remedy reaches beyond the parties. The majority rested on the Judiciary Act rather than the APA, and the opinion expressly left open, in its footnote 10, the distinct question whether the APA authorizes courts to vacate agency action. Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025). In the months since, the lower courts have generally continued to treat vacatur under Section 706 as the ordinary remedy for unlawful agency action, with an effect that is not confined to the plaintiffs who brought the case.7 On that understanding, the practical result here is that the four policies are set aside as to the defendant agencies, including USCIS, throughout the country, and not merely as to the organizations and individuals who sued.

Two qualifications keep that result from being the last word. First, the scope of APA vacatur is contested, and not only by the government. Members of the Supreme Court have questioned whether a universal set-aside is consistent with Article III and with the traditional, party-specific character of equitable relief. See United States v. Texas, 599 U.S. 670 (2023) (Gorsuch, J., concurring in the judgment). The Department of Justice has for several years pressed a narrower reading of Section 706 that would limit relief to the parties before the court. Those arguments are available to the government on appeal, and the question may eventually return to the Supreme Court.

Second, this is a judgment of a single district court. The government may appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and may ask for a stay pending appeal, whether under the APA’s stay provision, 5 U.S.C. § 705, or the ordinary stay standard, see Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 425-26 (2009). If a stay issues, the effect of the vacatur can be paused while the appeal runs. And because vacatur is not an injunction, it does not carry an injunction’s enforcement machinery. There is no order against named officials backed by the threat of contempt. Were the agency to pursue the same end by other means, such as fresh guidance or simply letting cases sit, testing that conduct would ordinarily require a new lawsuit rather than a motion to enforce this judgment.8

The bottom line for now is straightforward. The four policies are vacated and set aside nationwide as to the agencies that administer them, effective immediately, subject to appeal and to any stay that the court of appeals or the Supreme Court may grant.

Practical Implications

For the issue in general, the decision is a reminder that the entry power and the adjudication power are different powers. A proclamation can lawfully restrict who crosses the border. It does not give USCIS a roving license to stop deciding the cases of people who are already here and who have followed every rule. The decision also shows that the familiar threshold defenses, national security, the jurisdiction-stripping provisions of Section 1252, and committed-to-agency-discretion, do not bar a properly framed challenge to a categorical policy, as opposed to a single denial. That framing is the difference between a case that is heard and a case that is dismissed at the courthouse door.

A word of caution belongs here. This is a district court decision. The government may appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and may seek a stay, and the scope and durability of the vacatur could be tested on review. The reserved constitutional claims have not been decided. No one should treat the holds as gone for good until the dust settles, and counsel should watch the docket closely.

For the individual applicant, several consequences follow. If a benefit request, an adjustment application, a work-permit application, or a naturalization application has been frozen solely because of nationality, the legal basis for that freeze has been declared unlawful and vacated. The sensible steps are to confirm the current posting on the USCIS website,6 to document the date each application was filed and the date each deadline passed, and to be ready to press for adjudication now that the holds have been set aside. For asylum applicants in particular, the statutory 180-day adjudication clock and the work-permit timeline that depends on it are back in their ordinary operation, a subject the firm has covered both in its explanation of the asylum EAD clock and in its analysis of the agency’s separate 2026 proposal to slow the asylum work permit.

The point most relevant to this firm’s clients deserves emphasis. Three of the four policies turned on the travel-ban country list, which is heavily African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American, with Turkmenistan the principal post-Soviet country touched by the proclamations. The fourth policy, the Global Asylum Hold, was different. It paused every pending asylum and withholding case in the country without regard to nationality. That hold swept in asylum seekers from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Tajikistan, and the other post-Soviet states this practice most often represents, even though none of those countries sits on the travel-ban list. For a Russian-speaking applicant who has watched an asylum case go silent since December, the vacatur of the Global Asylum Hold is the part of this decision that matters most, and it is a reason to seek movement on a stalled case rather than to keep waiting.

As always, whether and how this ruling helps a particular person depends on the facts of that person’s case and on what the courts of appeals do next. Anyone whose case has been held should consult experienced immigration counsel before acting.9

  1. The decision was reported in Brendan Hickey, Federal Court Strikes Down a Slew of Immigration Restrictions Impacting 39 Countries, JURIST (June 7, 2026); see also Reuters, US Judge Invalidates Trump Policies Targeting Immigrants from 39 Countries (June 5, 2026).
  2. Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Afghan National Pleads Guilty to Plotting Election Day Terror Attack in the United States (June 13, 2025), as cited in the administrative record.
  3. Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Sec., regarding the November 26, 2025 shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. (Nov. 26, 2025), as cited in the administrative record.
  4. Statement of the President, posted to Truth Social (Nov. 27, 2025), and remarks at a Pennsylvania rally (Dec. 10, 2025), as quoted in the opinion. The remarks are recounted in Alexandra Marquez, NBC News (Dec. 10, 2025).
  5. Statement of then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, reposted by the President to Truth Social (Dec. 1, 2025), as quoted in the opinion.
  6. The relevant agency guidance comprises USCIS Policy Alert PA-2025-26 (Nov. 27, 2025); USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0192 (Dec. 2, 2025); and USCIS Policy Memorandum PM-602-0194 (Jan. 1, 2026). USCIS later posted an alert, Update on USCIS’ Strengthened Screening and Vetting (Mar. 30, 2026, last updated Apr. 30, 2026), which the court treated as insufficient to lift the holds because it was not a memorandum from the USCIS Director.
  7. For the consensus among the lower courts after CASA that 5 U.S.C. § 706 authorizes vacatur reaching beyond the named plaintiffs, see Cong. Rsch. Serv., LSB11331, Trump v. CASA, Inc.: Supreme Court Limits Nationwide Injunctions (July 1, 2025), and The Future of APA Relief After Trump v. CASA Limited Universal Injunctions, A.B.A. Sec. of Env’t, Energy & Res., Trends (Jan./Feb. 2026).
  8. See Supreme Court Substantially Limits Universal Injunctions (Trump v. CASA): Implications for Litigation Against the Government, Sidley Austin LLP (July 2025) (observing that, unlike an injunction, a Section 706 vacatur carries no direct enforcement mechanism such as contempt, and that an agency may respond by reissuing a policy through adjudication, enforcement, or informal guidance, which would typically require new litigation to challenge).
  9. Statement of Democracy Forward, counsel for the plaintiffs, issued in connection with the decision. This article is provided for general information and is not legal advice.