Federal Judge in Ohio Orders USCIS to Resume Processing Stalled Immigration Applications for 25 Foreign Nationals

A federal judge in Ohio has ordered the government to start moving again on a stack of immigration cases it had frozen because of where the applicants were born. On July 6, 2026, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio granted a preliminary injunction requiring U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Homeland Security to resume processing pending green card, work permit and travel-document applications for 25 foreign nationals who sued over the delays ^[1][2]. The plaintiffs hail from Burma, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, Venezuela and Canada, and Marbley gave the government 30 days to decide their pending work-permit requests ^[1]. He wrote that the government never explained how withholding decisions from people already living in the United States would protect public safety or national security ^[1].

What makes the ruling more than a routine administrative setback is a single sentence buried in the opinion itself: citing public statements by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, Marbley wrote that the administration's "general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people" ^[1]. That line, delivered in this same Ohio case rather than in some separate proceeding, is what much of the ensuing coverage seized on — some outlets treating it as the story, others barely mentioning it. USCIS has said it "strongly disagrees" with the ruling and may pursue further judicial review ^[6].

How the Freeze Began

The undisputed timeline starts with tragedy. On November 26, 2025, a shooting in Washington, D.C. killed one National Guard member; the suspect was an Afghan national who had previously been granted asylum ^[7]. In the months that followed, President Trump expanded a travel-ban framework he had begun in June 2025 with Proclamation 10949, covering 19 countries, into the far broader Proclamation 10998 in December 2025, which extended restrictions to 39 countries ^[4]. USCIS then issued policy memos, dated December 2, 2025 and January 1, 2026, placing an indefinite hold on immigration benefit requests from nationals of those listed countries and instructing officers to treat that nationality as a "significant negative factor" in adjudications ^[2][4].

The practical effect was that people who were already lawfully in the country — with pending Form I-485 adjustment-of-status applications, Form I-131 travel documents, or Form I-765 work permits — found their cases simply stopped moving, without a timeline for when, or whether, they would resume ^[1][2]. Marbley's injunction is not the only court to have intervened: a broader ruling by Chief Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island on June 5, 2026 vacated four USCIS directives nationwide, and courts in California, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Maryland and Indiana have issued similar relief against the same policies ^[2][3][8]. Notably, none of these rulings touched the underlying travel bans on entry to the United States, which remain fully in force — meaning an applicant could now have a green card or work permit approved yet still be barred from re-entering the country if they leave ^[8].

The Competing Imperatives

Underneath the legal back-and-forth sit three forces pulling against each other. The executive branch's core interest is preserving broad discretion over who receives immigration status, a position it frames through national security in the aftermath of a high-profile attack, regardless of the specific screening rationale offered in any given memo ^[4][6]. The judiciary's structural interest runs the other way: enforcing the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires agencies to give reasoned, lawful justifications and forbids them from using security as a blanket shield to indefinitely suspend adjudications ^[2]. And beneath both is a very concrete, apolitical stake — hundreds of thousands of applicants already living in the United States depend on timely decisions to legally work, travel, and eventually become permanent residents ^[3].

How Each Side Sees It

The plaintiffs and immigration-advocacy groups argue that people already lawfully present in the U.S. were left in limbo — unable to work, travel, or finalize their residency — solely because of their nationality, which they say is exactly the kind of arbitrary, origin-based discrimination that federal administrative law forbids. They contend an indefinite pause isn't enhanced vetting but a de facto denial, and that national security cannot excuse an agency from following the law ^[1][2]. Their goal is to restore access to work authorization and green cards and set a precedent that nationality alone cannot indefinitely stall a case; in practice, the 25 named plaintiffs now get processing restored on a court-ordered deadline, and hundreds of thousands of similarly situated applicants may benefit from the parallel rulings, though this particular order legally binds only the named individuals ^[1][3].

The Trump administration, through USCIS, DHS and the Justice Department, sees the same facts differently. After an asylee killed a National Guard soldier, it argues it has both the authority and the duty to pause and re-examine benefits for nationals of high-risk countries while strengthening screening, and it casts the holds as "core national security functions" that fall within executive discretion and are largely beyond judicial second-guessing ^[4][6]. Its goal is to follow through on an immigration-enforcement agenda and preserve executive control over who is granted status; the effect, for now, is a mounting string of adverse rulings and a nationwide vacatur that the administration must either comply with or appeal, even as the entry bans themselves stay intact ^[6][8].

The federal judiciary, across multiple districts, holds that even genuine security concerns don't exempt agency action from administrative law, and that national security "cannot be a talisman used to ward off inconvenient claims" ^[2]. Judges have framed the dispute as being about whether the agency followed lawful process, not whether any given country is currently safe, finding that the government failed to show how delaying decisions for people already inside the United States would advance security at all ^[1][2]. Immigration-restriction advocates and administration supporters counter that the Washington shooting proved vetting failures can be lethal, and that a temporary pause to re-screen applicants from unstable states is a reasonable security precaution rather than bigotry, viewing district judges as overstepping into policy that the Constitution assigns to the elected branches ^[4][7]. Court losses constrain that agenda's preferred tool, but the surviving entry bans and a likely appeal keep it alive ^[6][8].

How the Coverage Split

Outlets covered the same ruling through starkly different lenses. Newsweek and CBS News framed it largely as immigrants winning relief from a discriminatory freeze, using language like "relief" and "blow," and leaning on both Marbley's own "white people" line and the Rhode Island judge's separate finding that the broader policy was "rooted in unlawful bigotry" ^[1][2]. International Business Times UK went further, headlining the story around the quote that Trump "clearly prefers white people" while downplaying the narrower administrative-law basis for the injunction — a framing striking enough to draw a correction in earlier fact-checking, since the quote came from Marbley's own opinion in this case, not a separate ruling.

Right-leaning coverage, by contrast, emphasized that the underlying travel bans remain in force and that USCIS "strongly disagrees" and may appeal, foregrounding the November 2025 shooting as justification for tighter vetting and portraying the ruling as judicial overreach rather than legal correction ^[4][6][7]. Diaspora and non-Western outlets serving applicants from the 39 listed countries covered the story mainly as practical news — restored access to work permits and green cards — with headlines centered on relief for affected nationals rather than on the American constitutional or security debate. Courthouse News Service, a legal trade outlet, offered the most procedural account, quoting both the ruling and the government's national-security defense with comparatively little editorial framing ^[2].