US District Judge Julia Kobick in Boston reached that conclusion as she issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit by around 200 people from 20 countries including Iran, Haiti, Venezuela and Syria who sued over a halt on the processing of their immigration-related applications.

The lawsuit, filed in December, took aim at policies US Citizenship and Immigration Services adopted beginning in November affecting applications by immigrants seeking asylum, green cards and work authorization.

Those policies have resulted in the agency placing a hold on the processing of applications for people from the 39 countries that are the subject of full or partial travel bans imposed by Trump, who has cited vetting and security concerns.

Before instituting that halt, the agency, which is overseen by the US Department of Homeland Security, adopted a policy in November 2025 that treats the nationality of people from those countries as a “significant negative factor” when reviewing their applications.

Kobick, who was appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, concluded the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in proving that policy ran afoul of the Immigration and Nationality Act’s bar against nationality-based discrimination.

The judge said the agency’s subsequent halt on reviewing asylum and naturalization applications was likewise “contrary to Congress’s command that the agency issue decisions on such applications.” She said the pause on reviewing green card and work authorization applications violated regulations governing them.

Kobick blocked USCIS from enforcing the policies against 22 plaintiffs who had provided declarations detailing how they were harmed by them, and she directed the parties to discuss whether her order should apply to the rest of the 200.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Jim Hacking, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, welcomed the ruling, which he said appeared to be the first by a judge nationally to address the “significant negative factor” policy alongside the separate but related hold on the processing of applications. A handful of other judges have previously ruled against that halt in some migrants’ cases.

“USCIS wants to make it harder for people to receive an immigration benefit if they are from one of the 39 countries, even though Congress has never allowed them to,” he said.