A US federal judge has struck down the Trump administration’s ban on issuing visas to immigrants from 75 countries including Thailand, finding that the policy was “contrary to law” and beyond the legal authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In a 61-page ruling issued on Friday, Judge Jeannette Vargas of US District Court for the Southern District of New York disputed the administration’s public rationale for the policy, billed as a “pause”, that immigrants from the targeted countries were likely to draw public benefits and become “a financial burden to Americans”.
In fact, Vargas found, US officials were ordered to refuse visas to eligible immigrants who were likely to be self-sufficient, in violation of a statute that requires individualised assessments.
An internal State Department cable made public as evidence in the case instructed consular officers to deny visas even when visa applicants provided “additional evidence that demonstrates he or she overcomes the public charge refusal”.
The majority of the 75 countries on the State Department’s list are non-European and have significant non-white populations. They range across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, including a number of US allies such as Jordan and Egypt.
In Southeast Asia, the regulation affected applicants for immigration from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar in addition to Thailand.
Vargas’ ruling also reverses any visa denial that was based solely on the policy, which took effect in January. That raises the possibility that thousands of old visa applications would need to be reviewed.
Among the plaintiffs in the case are six US citizens who claim that the administration’s ban kept their relatives in Ghana, Jamaica, Guatemala and Ethiopia from receiving visas to travel to the United States.
Other plaintiffs are five professionals from Colombia — including an engineer, an architect and a Harvard-trained endocrinologist — who received notices that their visa applications had been denied, and referred to the Trump administration’s new policy.
In 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of his travel ban, which restricted entry into the US by foreign nationals from several Muslim-majority countries. But that earlier ruling upheld the president’s broad power to limit entry into the country, not the issuance of visas, Vargas wrote.
Friday’s ruling was praised by Joanna Cuevas Ingram, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, one of the nonprofit groups and private firms representing the plaintiffs.
“Today’s decision is a significant victory for the hundreds of thousands of families across the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by this administration’s unlawful and discriminatory visa ban,” she said in a statement.
Neither the Justice Department nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment.
The administration could appeal the ruling by Vargas, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
- This article originally appeared in The New York Times