(RHODE ISLAND) — Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled on June 5, 2026 that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services must immediately restart immigration adjudications halted under a set of agency-wide processing holds, striking down the policies in a sweeping decision that applies nationwide.

McConnell said the USCIS policies exceeded the agency’s statutory authority and violated the Administrative Procedure Act. In a 135-page ruling in Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, No. 1:26-cv-00132, he set aside four policy memoranda issued between December 2025 and January 2026.

The ruling means the holds no longer apply only to the plaintiffs who brought the case. Nationwide vacatur sets the policies aside for all affected applicants, reopening standard processing for cases that had been frozen for months under the agency’s revised screening rules.

McConnell framed the case as one in which immigrants had followed the rules and still found themselves blocked by agency action. “In ruling on these motions, 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.’ This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that. 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 added: “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 four vacated USCIS policies touched nearly every stage of the benefits system. One imposed a Global Asylum Hold that indefinitely stopped all affirmative asylum adjudications. Another, described in the case as the Benefits Hold, suspended processing of green card applications under Form I-485, work permit requests under Form I-765, and naturalization filings under Form N-400 for certain nationals.

A third memo created what the court described as a Comprehensive Re-Review, adding extra vetting for already-approved benefits involving certain people who entered the United States after January 2021. A fourth, the Country-Specific Factors Policy, instructed adjudicators to treat an applicant’s country of origin as a “significant negative factor” in discretionary decisions.

The case centered on nationals from 39 countries the government had designated as high-risk. The list included Afghanistan, Burma, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The ruling describes a system in which applications remained pending not because of missing documents or individual security findings, but because of blanket agency directives tied to nationality.

The backlog described in the litigation was vast. Experts estimated that USCIS accepted more than $1 billion in fees for more than two million applications that it then refused to process. By the time McConnell ruled, the Benefits Hold governed by memoranda PM-602-0192 and PM-602-0194 had been in effect for 185 days.

Those holds were part of a broader shift in USCIS policies after a November 26, 2025 National Guard shooting in Washington, D.C., involving an Afghan national. USCIS cited “operational necessity” when it issued memoranda, including PM-602-0192 on December 2, 2025, saying it needed to ensure that applicants from high-risk countries did not pose a threat to national security.

McConnell rejected that explanation, writing that the national security rationale was “pretextual.” He said the agency had used the events following the shooting to justify “anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making.”

That finding cuts to the center of how the court treated the case. McConnell did not merely fault the government for delay. He found that USCIS had adopted categorical processing holds without legal authority and had tied discretionary decisions to national origin in ways the court concluded were unlawful.

The immediate effect falls on people whose applications for work permits, travel documents, permanent residency and naturalization had stalled under the holds. The decision restores standard adjudication procedures, allowing cases to move again through ordinary agency channels rather than remain suspended indefinitely.

McConnell wrote that the freeze had thrown “countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo,” cutting off lawful employment and blocking travel to see family members abroad. With the policies vacated nationwide, those consequences are no longer limited to the named plaintiffs’ claims in Rhode Island but extend to every applicant covered by the challenged memoranda.

The decision also arrives at a time when scrutiny of USCIS policies has widened beyond asylum claims alone. The vacated memoranda reached affirmative asylum adjudications, benefits already approved, and discretionary immigration decisions, creating a freeze that stretched across several parts of the agency’s case system.

Lawyers and applicants tracking the case can review the docket for Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS on [CourtListener](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72369535/dorcas-international-institute-of-rhode-island-v-united-states-citizenship/). USCIS had not posted a formal Department of Homeland Security press release response by the afternoon of June 5, 2026, though the agency’s [USCIS Newsroom](https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom) remained the main federal page for public statements.

A related policy backdrop also sits in the Federal Register. The notice at [91 FR 34352](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/06/04/2026-11285/clarification-of-discretionary-employment-authorization-for-certain-aliens) addresses discretionary employment authorization changes proposed after the freeze, placing the court’s order against a wider administrative effort to tighten adjudication standards for certain noncitizens.

Friday’s order leaves USCIS with a direct command from the bench: resume processing. After months of processing holds, applicants whose cases had stopped because of the vacated memoranda now return to the regular rules that governed their filings before the freeze began.