World News
United States court voids the immigrant visa suspension covering 75 countries
By Staff Writer | 25 August 2026
A judge in the Southern District of New York held the January policy patently unlawful, set aside the refusals made under it and ordered case by case assessment to resume.
A United States federal judge has struck down the policy that suspended the issue of immigrant visas to applicants from 75 countries, holding that it went beyond the authority the statute gives the Secretary of State. The ruling was given on Friday in the Southern District of New York by Judge Jeannette Vargas.
The policy was issued in January as an instruction to consular officers, who were directed to refuse immigrant visas to applicants from every country on the list. One of the records puts the list at about 40 per cent of the world's nations. It covered countries in Latin America including Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay, in the Balkans including Bosnia and Albania, in South Asia including Pakistan and Bangladesh, and a large number in Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean.
Where the instruction ran out of authority
The reasoning turns on who decides. The governing statute requires a consular officer to assess each applicant individually, weighing matters such as skills, savings and the support available from family already in the country, and it removes from the Secretary of State any authority over that adjudication. A blanket instruction to refuse leaves the officer with nothing to decide.
The Policy, which categorically prohibits the issuance of immigrant visas based upon the nationality of the applicant, represents a direct abrogation of this statutory scheme
Judge Jeannette Vargas, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
The judge described the instruction as patently unlawful and held that it mandated the refusal of eligible applicants without any basis in law, with the result that whatever the officer determined about eligibility was irrelevant because the outcome was already fixed.
A discretion conferred on one office cannot be exercised by another, and an instruction that removes the discretion altogether is not an exercise of it. The proposition travels well beyond immigration.
What the ruling actually does
The court vacated every visa refusal that rested solely on the policy and directed the department to resume assessing applications one at a time. That is not the same as granting anybody a visa. An applicant whose refusal has been set aside returns to the queue and is assessed on the merits, and the stated basis of the original policy, that the applicants presented a high risk of becoming a public charge, remains a lawful ground of refusal when it is applied to a person rather than to a passport.
The claim was brought by two immigrant rights organisations together with visa applicants and citizens sponsoring relatives. Neither record read for this report shows an appeal having been filed, and the department had not commented on the ruling.
Why this reaches a construction readership
Design offices, contractors and consultancies in the United States recruit heavily from the countries on that list, and immigrant visas are the route by which a hire becomes permanent rather than temporary. Seven months of blanket refusals will have left firms with candidates who accepted an offer, resigned a job and then could not move.
The practical effect of the ruling is a queue rather than a fix. Cases set aside must be worked through again, individually, by consular posts that have spent most of the year not doing that work. Anyone holding a resource plan that depends on one of those hires should treat the decision as the start of a process with an unknown duration, not as a date.