The Diaspora

A judge voids the visa pause but a proclamation still bars Palestinians

Times of Palestine4h ago

Published Monday, August 24, 2026 · 09:00 Jerusalem time

Image credit: The Harry S. Truman Building, State Department headquarters, Washington — Wikimedia Commons / US Department of State, public domain · License

Original Reporting

By the Times of Palestine Newsdesk · 4 min read

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A federal judge in Manhattan struck down one of the two American policies that have kept families apart across the Palestinian diaspora this year. The other one, the one that actually names Palestinians, is untouched.

Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Southern District of New York ruled on Friday that the State Department's indefinite pause on immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries is unlawful. The policy, she wrote, "is contrary to law and was issued in excess of Secretary Rubio's statutory authority," and she called it patently unlawful.

"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," Vargas wrote. Federal immigration law, she found, deliberately withholds from the secretary of state any authority over how consular officers decide individual immigrant visa cases; the department had also run afoul of antidiscrimination protections.

The suit was brought by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and African Communities Together together with visa applicants and American citizens sponsoring relatives abroad.

The policy they challenged took effect on 21 January and covered close to 40 per cent of the world's countries — Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Bosnia, Albania, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Russia and dozens more — on the stated ground that their nationals posed a high risk of becoming a public charge.

Why it does not free Palestinian families#

The bar that reaches Palestinians is a different instrument, and it survives the ruling intact.

Presidential Proclamation 10998, "Restricting and Limiting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the Security of the United States," took effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on 1 January.

It suspends visa issuance fully or partially to nationals of 39 countries, and then, separately and by name, to anyone applying on a travel document issued or endorsed by the Palestinian Authority. For those applicants the suspension is full: every nonimmigrant and every immigrant category.

The published exceptions are narrow. Special immigrant visas for people who worked for the American government, under section 1101(a)(27)(D) of title 8, are exempt, and the department later added an exception for children being adopted by American citizens. Palestinians who already hold a valid visa are not affected by the proclamation, and a Palestinian who holds a second nationality may apply on that other passport.

That leaves one group with no route at all: a relative in the West Bank or Gaza whose only travel document is a Palestinian Authority passport.

The proclamation formalised something the consulates were already doing. From August 2025 the State Department was refusing visas to holders of Palestinian Authority passports under a policy it had not announced, as the Times of Israel reported at the time, with the internal instruction stating that the United States does not recognise the Palestinian Authority as a foreign government.

The categories caught by it were the ordinary ones: medical treatment, university study, family visits, business travel, and diplomatic and official travel.

What the ruling changes, and what to watch#

For a Palestinian-American sponsoring a parent, a sibling or a spouse, Friday's ruling removes one layer and leaves the decisive one standing. If the relative can apply on a second nationality — Jordanian, Chilean, American-issued refugee travel documents in some cases — the immigrant visa route is now open again where the 75-country pause had closed it. If the relative can only present a Palestinian Authority document, nothing has changed.

Immigration-law summaries have described the 75-country list inconsistently on whether the Palestinian Authority appeared on it, and the department has not published the list in a form that settles the question. It does not change the outcome: the proclamation reaches the same applicants either way.

Two things are worth watching. The department has not said whether it will appeal to the Second Circuit, and a stay pending appeal would put the 75-country pause back in force while the case runs.

And nothing in Vargas's reasoning touches presidential authority under section 212(f) of the immigration act, the provision the proclamation rests on and the one the Supreme Court upheld in Trump v. Hawaii in 2018 — so a challenge to the Palestinian bar would have to be built on different ground.

Families with a case in progress should verify their own status with the consulate handling it and with a licensed immigration attorney rather than relying on any published summary, this one included. The rules changed twice this year already.