U.S. citizens, immigrant families, and legal organizations filed a federal lawsuit Monday in New York challenging the Trump administration’s suspension of immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries. The complaint, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, names Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department as defendants, arguing that the policy constitutes an unlawful, nationality-based ban on legal immigration.
The State Department characterized the policy as a pause in visa approvals, affecting predominantly non-European countries. The ban has already separated families and disrupted professional plans. Among the plaintiffs is a Long Island man whose wife and nursing child remain in Guatemala after her visa was denied, and a Colombian endocrinologist whose approved employment-based visa was blocked.
The lawsuit, filed by the National Immigration Law Center, Democracy Forward, The Legal Aid Society, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Colombo & Hurd, described the administration’s justification invoking “public charge” risk as an “unsupported and demonstrably false claim,” noting that most immigrants are ineligible for cash welfare for years after arrival.
Advocacy groups emphasized the ban’s disproportionate impact on nonwhite communities. Anna Gallagher, Executive Director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc (CLINIC), remarked, “This administration is trying to shut down lawful immigration from nearly half the countries in the world without legal authority or justification.” Diana Konaté, Deputy Executive Director at African Communities Together, added that the policy “makes an already broken system even more harmful by cruelly denying families the chance to reunite.”
The complaint asserts that the visa suspension violates the Administrative Procedure Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the constitutional separation of powers. It challenges the Department of State’s expanded interpretation of public charge rules and seeks a court order to block the policy, arguing that it undermines established immigration law and discriminates against families and workers seeking entry into the United States.
