A US federal judge ruled on Friday that the Donald Trump administration's immigration ban on 39 countries imposed after last November's DC shooting was unlawful. Chief US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, ruled that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services had adopted a series of unlawful policies targeting people from 39 African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries.
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The Obama-appointed judge said those policies threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo. "USCIS’s hold on adjudications cannot be attributed to anything that these individuals did wrong; rather, it arises solely by the happenstance of their birth," he wrote. "But the rule of law has to apply to everyone equally and, as evident here, USCIS has neither 'followed the law' nor 'done things the right way,'" McConnell wrote in a 135-page verdict. "Indeed, the agency has violated the very immigration laws that Congress has charged it with administering, as well as the administrative laws that govern the agency’s actions."
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately react to the ruling. The administration can appeal against the ruling and can plea for a stay of the verdict immediately if they do not want the ban to be lifted.
The policies barring immigrants from a list of countries from getting any immigration benefits, visas, Green Cards, travel visas, were announced after an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, shot two National Guard members in Washington. Lakanwal did not plead guilty.
“The court is reminded of a line often repeated in discussions around immigration policy: If people wish to immigrate to the United States, they ought to ‘follow the law’ and ‘do things the right way,’” the judge wrote. “This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.”
List of the 39 countries
Full suspension: Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen
Partial suspension: Angola, Antigua & Barbuda, Benin, Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Zambia, Zimbabwe
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