U.S. judge strikes down visa freeze covering 75 countries, including Yemen

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NEW YORK, United States — A federal judge has struck down a U.S. State Department policy that froze immigrant visa issuance for nationals of 75 countries, among them Yemen.

Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York issued the ruling on Friday. She called the policy “patently unlawful.”

Vargas said the suspension conflicted with federal immigration law, which she wrote had stripped the secretary of state of authority over how consular officers adjudicate immigrant visas.

“The Policy, which categorically prohibits the issuance of immigrant visas based upon the nationality of the applicant, represents a direct abrogation of this statutory scheme,” she wrote.

The decision vacates the policy and the visa refusals issued under it, and directs the government to reconsider those cases, according to reports of the ruling.

The suit was brought by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and African Communities Together, together with immigrant visa applicants and U.S. citizens sponsoring relatives from the listed countries. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the named defendant.

Vargas was appointed by former President Joe Biden.

The State Department instructed consulates to halt the visas in a cable dated Jan. 14. The pause took effect Jan. 21.

The department said applicants from the listed countries were “at a high risk for becoming a public charge and recourse to local, state and federal government resources in the United States.”

“Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassess immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits,” the department said in January.

The policy created a presumption of ineligibility under the public charge provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, according to immigration law firm advisories published at the time. Countries were selected using Council of Economic Advisers figures on the share of immigrant households from each country of origin receiving public assistance, with those above 30 percent added.

Yemen appeared on the list alongside Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Tunisia. Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina were also named.

The pause covered permanent immigration only. Tourist, student, business and other temporary visas were unaffected. Applicants could still file paperwork and attend interviews, but no immigrant visa could be approved while the freeze held.

Dual nationals applying on a passport from a country outside the list were exempt.

The State Department set no end date.

For Yemenis the freeze sat on top of restrictions already in force. Yemen was one of 12 countries covered by a full travel ban imposed in June 2025, alongside Afghanistan, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia and Sudan.

Immigration officials also suspended asylum cases and stopped processing citizenship and green card applications for nationals of the countries first named in that ban.

The list was widened in December 2025 to add Palestine, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria.

Friday’s ruling does not touch those measures. It addresses only the immigrant visa freeze.

The 75-country pause followed an order in November 2025 tightening checks on prospective immigrants judged likely to become a financial burden, and a halt to diversity visa issuance in late December. A separate travel ban covering 39 countries took effect Jan. 1 and was struck down by a federal judge in June.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has described the measures as a rapid sequence of overlapping restrictions. Rights organisations have said the crackdown raises free speech and due process concerns, and have pointed to racial profiling.

In October the White House set a refugee admissions cap of 7,500 for the 2026 fiscal year, the lowest in U.S. history.

The Department of Homeland Security said it had deported more than 605,000 people by early December, and that a further 1.9 million had left the country on their own.

An analysis by the Brookings Institution found the United States recorded net negative immigration in 2025, the first such year in five decades. Its researchers put the net loss at between 10,000 and 295,000 people.

The State Department had not commented on the ruling as of Saturday.

Yemenis seeking to join relatives in the United States come from a country the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its March 2026 response plan has more than 22 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and 18.3 million who are acutely food insecure.

The same plan recorded 5.2 million internally displaced people and sought $2.16 billion to reach 12 million of those in need.

Yemen has been divided since 2014, when Houthi forces took Sanaa. The internationally recognised government operates from Aden.

A vacated policy does not guarantee a visa. Applications returned to consulates remain subject to the standard eligibility checks, including a public charge assessment applied case by case rather than by nationality.

Consular capacity is a further constraint. The U.S. embassy in Sanaa suspended operations in February 2015, and Yemeni applicants have since pursued immigrant visa cases through posts abroad. A 2018 Yale Law School report documented Yemeni-American families waiting on cases in Djibouti.