Trump administration suffers double legal setback over immigration policy

US President Donald Trump’s administration has suffered two setbacks to its immigration agenda as a federal judge halted proposed visa caps and dozens of Democratic-led states launched legal challenges against broader residency restrictions.

A US federal judge on Monday blocked the administration from imposing fixed time limits on how long foreign students and journalists can remain in the country without applying for extensions. At the same time, a broad coalition of states filed suit to stop a separate federal regulation that would allow immigration authorities to deny green cards to immigrants who make lawful use of public benefits.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulation was scheduled to take effect on Tuesday before US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Boston granted an injunction requested by a coalition of trade unions and higher education advocacy groups.

Under Trump’s proposed limitation , F visas for international students and J visas that allow cultural exchange programmes in the US would be capped at four years. I visas for journalists, which currently can last for years, would be limited to 240 days.

Saylor, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, called the DHS’s rationale citing national security and the need to prevent fraud in the visa programme “exceptionally weak”.

He noted that the existing system has allowed tens of millions of scholars to contribute to groundbreaking research and substantial economic expansion, warning that the damage to higher education and the wider US economy would be “catastrophic”.

The measures would affect roughly 1.6 million international students holding F visas and about 500,000 exchange visitors on J visas.

Two lawsuits were filed in a Manhattan federal court on Monday to derail a DHS regulation scheduled to take effect on Friday. The measure seeks to broaden the criteria by which immigration officers can deem applicants inadmissible as a “public charge”, a legal standard historically applied to individuals likely to become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.