Washington, DC – A group of United States citizens and immigrant rights groups has launched a lawsuit seeking to challenge the sweeping suspension of immigrant visa processing for 75 countries by the administration of United States President Donald Trump.
The lawsuit filed on Monday argues that the Trump administration has relied on a false narrative to justify the visa processing suspension, one of the most substantial restrictions on legal immigration in the country’s history.
The lawsuit charges the policy “constitutes an unlawful nationality-based ban on legal immigration and a new set of discriminatory, unlawful public charge rules that strips families and working people of the process guaranteed by law”, according to a case overview by the National Immigration Law Center, which is among the groups supporting the legal challenge.
The sprawling 106-page complaint further alleges that the administration relies “on an unsupported and demonstrably false claim that nationals of the covered countries migrate to the United States to improperly rely on cash welfare and are likely to become ‘public charges'”.
The State Department has described the action, announced in mid-January, as a “pause” on immigrant visa processing on “countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates”.
The department has not revealed the criteria it used to determine which countries were added to the list, which comes amid a wider effort to constrict legal...
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