US judge blocks Trump’s ‘absurd’ visa caps for students, journalists

A US federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a new visa cap for international students, visiting scholars and foreign journalists, saying the Trump administration’s national security justification “borders on the absurd”.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor in Boston said the rationale for the restriction was “exceptionally weak”, and the connection between the rule and the problems it purported to address was “exceptionally attenuated”.

He wrote that the US Department of Homeland Security had built the case “almost entirely on a small handful of anecdotes, each of which involved incidents that the new rule would do nothing to prevent or even mitigate”.