Immigration News

On July 7, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals published its precedential decision in Matter of R-A-N-, 29 I. & N. Dec. 739 (B.I.A. 2026). The Board vacated a grant of asylum to a citizen of Russia who fled his country in October 2022, when Russia intensified its mobilization of men for the war against Ukraine.

On May 22, 2026, the Associated Press reported what immigration practitioners on the West Coast had already absorbed three weeks earlier: the San Francisco Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery Street had closed its doors for good on May 1, 2026, leaving the city without a primary immigration tribunal for the first time in modern memory.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan publicly acknowledged on May 20, 2026 that the pace of deportations under President Donald Trump’s second term has declined, attributing the slowdown to a combination of adverse federal court rulings, sanctuary city policies, a 75-day Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding lapse, and continuing political fallout from immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis.

On June 11, 2026, Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island issued a terse enforcement order directing the federal government to comply at once with the decision he had entered one week earlier vacating four United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) policies that had frozen the adjudication of asylum applications and a range of related immigration benefits.

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court brought a year and a half of fear and uncertainty to an end for hundreds of thousands of families. The Court struck down Executive Order 14,160 by a vote of six to three, and on the deeper constitutional question it divided five to four, with a five-member majority holding that the Fourteenth Amendment itself guarantees citizenship to nearly every child born on American soil, including children whose parents are in the country unlawfully or only temporarily.

A public school teacher in Los Angeles has told an activist audience that she married a man in Gaza, in an online ceremony, for the express purpose of helping him obtain immigration status in the United States. She called it a way to equalize the playing field.

In a development that underscores ongoing turmoil in the nation’s immigration courts, former Chicago-based Immigration Judge Carla I. Espinoza has filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), claiming her termination in July 2025 violated her First Amendment rights and federal anti-discrimination laws.

On May 14, 2026, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas granted a preliminary injunction blocking four provisions of Texas Senate Bill 4 (S.B. 4, 88-4), one day before the 2023 statute was scheduled to take effect on May 15, 2026.

On May 15, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced that April 2026 marked the twelfth consecutive month in which the United States Border Patrol released zero apprehended noncitizens into the interior of the United States from the southwest border.