On April 30, 2026, a federal judge in Massachusetts issued a significant ruling that may affect anyone with a pending immigration benefit application in the United States. In Akmurat O. Doe et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al., Judge Julia E. Kobick found that two sweeping USCIS policies — one placing an indefinite hold on benefit applications from nationals of 39 countries and all asylum seekers (set forth in PM 602-0192 and PM 602-0194), and another treating an applicant’s nationality as a “significant negative factor” in discretionary decisions (announced in PA 2025-26) — are likely unlawful. The court ordered USCIS to immediately lift the adjudicative hold for 22 individual applicants who demonstrated concrete harm, and to stop applying the nationality-based negative factor to their adjustment of status and work authorization applications.
The court’s reasoning is just as important as the immediate result. The court concluded that the adjudicative hold violates federal statutes and USCIS’s own regulations, which require the agency to decide applications for naturalization, asylum, adjustment of status, and work authorization within the frameworks Congress established. It also found that USCIS failed to provide a reasoned explanation for the policy and failed to consider the reliance interests of thousands of applicants whose lives have been placed on indefinite hold. And it held that treating nationality as a negative factor in adjustment of status and work authorization cases violates the Immigration and Nationality Act’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in visa issuance.