A federal judge in Ohio ordered the White House on Monday to unfreeze immigrant benefit applications, including filings for work authorization and green cards, in a ruling that cut against the Trump administration and put the policy on hold for now.
U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley said the move covered applicants in the U.S. from Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania and Venezuela. For readers searching the USCIS green card preliminary injunction now, the key point is that the order takes effect immediately and remains in place only until the court changes it or a higher court does, which is how temporary injunctions work.
Marbley did not treat the dispute as a neutral paperwork fight. He wrote that Trump and JD Vance showed “outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election,” and said their criticism seemed aimed at people from the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Asia. He added that there appeared to be “an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people.”
The ruling lands in a larger fight over immigration that has already been fueled by some of the administration’s harshest rhetoric. The White House has denied racism, but Marbley’s language tied the benefit freeze to a broader effort to shut immigrants out and punish them for where they come from.
That tension is why the order matters beyond this one case. It restores access to a process that affects whether people can work legally and keep their immigration cases moving, even as the legal fight itself stays narrow and temporary. The judge’s order does not settle the issue for good; it only blocks the policy while the case continues.
The same public debate around immigration is now colliding with another allegation-driven story involving Graham Platner, 41, and Jenny Racicot, who said he sexually assaulted her in 2021 after entering her home uninvited and forcing himself on her even as she told him to stop. Racicot told Politico that she remembered him grabbing her pelvis and thinking, “This is no longer my choice,” and said her delay in speaking out reflected a moral conflict between supporting his politics and not supporting him as a person. Platner called any accusation of non-consensual behavior categorically false and posted a video on X after the allegations.
Marbley’s order gives the White House no clean escape. The applications are moving again for now, the people covered by the freeze are named, and the fight over whether the policy survives will come next in court, not in public spin.
