A coalition of U.S. citizens, immigrant families, and nonprofit organizations filed a federal lawsuit seeking to halt the Trump administration’s suspension of immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries, a policy that attorneys and advocates say is already affecting families and workers in the District and across the region.
“This administration is trying to shut down lawful immigration from nearly half the countries in the world without legal authority or justification,” said Anna Gallagher, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, which works with immigration legal providers serving families in Washington, D.C. “We denounce this continued effort to scapegoat immigrants and disregard both the will of Congress and the inherent human dignity of those seeking safety, family unity, and opportunity.”
The lawsuit challenges a State Department directive that pauses immigrant visa issuance for nationals of 75 countries based on claims that applicants from those nations pose a higher risk of relying on public assistance. The plaintiffs argue the policy operates as a nationality-based ban that replaces the individualized review required by federal immigration law with automatic refusals.
Immigration advocates in the District say the pause has triggered an influx of calls from residents seeking help for relatives whose visas were approved but abruptly halted.
“The 75-country visa ban is yet another unlawful and racist policy from the Trump administration that disproportionately harms Africans seeking to immigrate to the United States,” said Diana Konaté, deputy executive director of policy and advocacy at African Communities Together (ACT). “Our immigration system already contains deeply embedded discrimination that makes obtaining a visa extraordinarily difficult for people across the African continent. This ban makes an already broken system even more harmful by cruelly denying families the chance to reunite. ACT and its members will continue to fight these policies.”
Among the plaintiffs are U.S. citizens whose family-based visa petitions were approved, fees paid, and consular interviews completed, only to be told that visas would not be issued because of nationality. A New York grandmother petitioning for her adult children and grandchildren from Ghana learned at their January interviews that their visas were refused solely because Ghana is included on the list.
Another plaintiff, a Long Island, N.Y., father, remains separated from his wife and infant child, who are stranded in Guatemala following a consular interview that coincided with the policy’s effective date. Advocates say similar family separations are now being reported to legal aid offices serving the Washington area.
The complaint also includes employment-based applicants whose work has already been deemed beneficial to the United States. One plaintiff is a Colombian physician with decades of experience in endocrinology whose employment-based first preference visa was approved before being stopped. Other professionals approved under national interest waiver programs say their cases were frozen after interviews, preventing them from accepting U.S. positions in health care, energy, and infrastructure, fields closely tied to federal agencies and research institutions headquartered in Washington.
The suit argues the State Department is misusing the concept of public charge to justify the suspension, even though federal law requires case-by-case determinations and bars discrimination in immigrant visa issuance based on nationality.
The complaint states that most immigrant visa applicants are ineligible for federal assistance programs for years and that Congress has made clear that lawful use of authorized benefits cannot be used to deny immigration status. Immigrants, the filing notes, pay state, local, and federal taxes and contribute to economic growth, including in the District.
“The State Department cannot rewrite immigration law to advance a discriminatory agenda,” said Hasan Shafiqullah, supervising attorney in the Civil Law Reform Unit at The Legal Aid Society. “This policy is arbitrary, unlawful, and deeply harmful to families who have followed the rules and are simply seeking to reunite with their loved ones.”