A coalition of U.S. citizens, immigration nonprofits, and legal organizations filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan on Monday against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department, seeking to block a visa ban affecting 75 countries that they allege attempts to “eviscerate decades of settled immigration law” through racial discrimination and violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the National Immigration Law Center, Democracy Forward, The Legal Aid Society, the Western Center on Law & Poverty, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Colombo & Hurd, includes individual plaintiffs whose lives have been upended by the suspension, including a New York mother and grandmother petitioning for four adult children and three grandchildren from Ghana who were denied visas despite approved petitions, and a Long Island father whose wife and nursing child from Guatemala are now stuck abroad and indefinitely separated from him.
“The 75-country visa ban is yet another unlawful and racist policy from the Trump administration that disproportionately harms Africans seeking to immigrate to the United States,” said Diana Konaté, deputy executive director of policy and advocacy at African Communities Together. Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement: “The Trump administration is again nakedly revealing the base racism behind its immigration policy, clothed this time in obviously pretextual tropes about nonwhite families undeservedly taking benefits.