A federal judge in Ohio on Monday ordered the White House to unfreeze immigrants’ benefit applications, temporarily blocking a policy that had stopped filings for work authorization and green cards. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley put the brakes on the Trump administration’s attempt to keep those applications on hold while the case moves forward.
The order matters now because it affects immigrants already in the U.S. who are waiting on permission to work or on green card processing, including people from Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania and Venezuela. For them, the court action means the files should be moving again, at least for the moment, instead of sitting frozen under a policy challenge that has already become a test of how far the White House can go in slowing immigration benefits.
Marbley tied the case to language he said reflected hostility toward immigrants. In his ruling, he wrote that Trump and JD Vance showed “outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election,” and said that hostility appeared aimed at people from the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia. He quoted Trump’s remarks about people coming to the U.S. from “shithole countries,” along with Trump’s claim that Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He also wrote that there was “an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people.”
The judge did not come to the bench as a newcomer to federal power. President Clinton nominated Marbley in 1997, and the order he issued on Monday shows how quickly a federal court can interrupt an administration’s immigration machinery when a policy runs into constitutional or statutory resistance. The ruling was only temporarily blocked on Monday, though, so the freeze is not dead; it is paused while the legal fight continues over whether the White House can keep these benefit applications out of process.
That pause is the story’s pressure point. The applications are back in motion for now, but the order leaves unresolved how long immigrants seeking work authorization and green cards will have before the next court move or government response decides whether the freeze returns.
