A federal court in New York has dealt a fresh blow to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, ruling that a State Department policy barring immigrant visa processing for citizens of 75 countries, including Nigeria, exceeded the authority granted to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
US District Judge Jeannette Vargas, sitting in the Southern District of New York, handed down the ruling on Friday, describing the policy as “patently unlawful” and finding that it conflicted with federal immigration law, which strips the Secretary of State of authority over consular officers’ handling of immigrant visa applications.
In her written opinion, Vargas held that the policy’s blanket ban on issuing immigrant visas based on an applicant’s nationality amounted to a direct violation of the statutory framework Congress had set up.
The suspension took effect in January this year and affected applicants not only from Nigeria and other African nations but also from Latin American countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay, and Balkan states including Bosnia and Albania.
The Trump administration had defended the move on “public charge” grounds, the argument that applicants from the listed countries were likely to become dependent on public assistance once in the US.
But Vargas found that officers on the ground were not applying the individualized assessment the law requires.
Under the law, an immigrant can only be turned away as a likely public charge after a consular officer weighs that person’s own finances, age, health, skills, and family situation; yet in practice, US officers were ordered to reject visas for applicants, even those who could support themselves, solely based on the country they came from.
Notably, the court found that the ban applied to permanent-residence visas for people joining family members or taking jobs in the US but did not extend to nonimmigrant visas such as tourist or student visas.
Central to Vargas’s reasoning was a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act barring nationality-based discrimination in visa issuance.
The lawsuit, brought by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network against Rubio, argued the guidance violated that statute, and Vargas agreed, writing that the harm was directly traceable to a policy directing consular officers to refuse immigrant visa applicants based on nationality, meaning US citizens petitioning for family members, along with intending immigrants themselves, had been turned away because of where they were from.
The administration had leaned heavily on Trump v. Hawaii, the 2018 Supreme Court decision that upheld the third iteration of Trump’s first-term travel ban targeting several, largely Muslim-majority, countries.
Vargas rejected the comparison, reasoning that the earlier case turned on the president’s authority to decide who may enter the country, while this case concerned an entirely different question: whether a visa may be issued at all.
The suit was filed by immigrant rights groups, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and African Communities Together, joined by immigrant visa applicants and US citizens seeking to sponsor family members from the designated countries.
Vargas, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has given both sides until September 11 to propose how to resolve what remains of the case, and the administration retains the option to appeal. The Justice Department and the White House have not yet issued a public response to the ruling.
For Nigeria and the other 74 affected countries spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the decision marks a significant, if potentially temporary, reprieve for families and prospective immigrants whose visa applications had been frozen since January.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
A U.S. federal judge has struck down the Trump administration’s blanket ban on immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries, including Nigeria, ruling that the policy was unlawful because it denied visas based on nationality alone rather than an individual assessment of each applicant, as required by law.
This restores a pathway for affected applicants, though the administration may still appeal, and both sides have until September 11 to address what remains of the case.
