Immigration

The Hill -  A federal judge on Friday vacated a series of Trump policies enacted in the wake of a deadly attack on National Guard members, forcing immigration agencies to again process immigration applications from citizens of nearly 40 countries.

In the days surrounding last Thanksgiving, President Trump barred the processing of any immigration application for those from 39 travel ban countries, halting the ability to get green cards and leading to widespread cancellation of naturalization ceremonies. 

He also put a stop to the processing of asylum claims from any country and ordered a review of all immigration benefits bestowed to those from the 39 travel ban countries under President Biden.

Rhode Island-based U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell found all of the actions were unlawful.  “More than six months ago, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) enacted a series of policies that threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo,” McConnell wrote in the 135-page ruling.

“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.”

The ruling is a major victory for immigrants and their advocates, who had seen processing come to an abrupt halt — a pause that threatened to push some legal immigrants on time-limited visas to overstay the bounds of their status.

The Guardian -   Detainees at Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail said guards were denying them food and fresh water on Thursday until they signed documents presented to them in English that they did not understand.

In an audio recording of a telephone call to an immigration advocacy group heard by the Guardian, more than half a dozen detainees alleged that the water given to them over the last three days was “rotten” and containing mosquito larvae, in an apparent attempt to pressure them to sign.

.....“They took all the water, and they don’t want to give us water,” one detainee said in the call to a representative of the Workers Circle, an advocacy group that has acted as a liaison between detainees and their families. “They haven’t given us lunch, and they are mistreating us here. Right now, at this very moment, half past one in the afternoon, we haven’t had lunch here in Alcatraz, and they wanted to make us sign a paper in English that we don’t know what that paper says.