Federal judges in Boston and Chicago handed the Trump administration a pair of legal victories on Friday, lifting court orders that had blocked the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Temporary Protected Status for nationals of South Sudan and Burma. The twin rulings mark the latest in a string of courtroom wins that have allowed DHS to strip deportation protections from migrants across eleven countries, a campaign that now covers more than one million people.
DHS General Counsel James Percival announced the Burma decision in a post on X, calling it the administration’s newest success in a legal offensive that has steadily dismantled TPS designations the Biden administration had extended or expanded. The Chicago ruling clears the way for DHS to end protections for approximately 3,700 Burmese nationals.
The Boston ruling, meanwhile, resolved a case that had bounced through multiple stages of litigation. U.S. District Judge Patti Saris lifted her previous order blocking the termination of TPS for South Sudan, a decision affecting over 232 TPS holders and 73 pending applicants, the Washington Examiner reported.
Percival did not hold back about the South Sudan outcome. In his post, as quoted by the Washington Examiner, the DHS general counsel framed the ruling in bluntly political terms:
“Judge Patti Saris just lifted her order preventing us from terminating TPS for South Sudan. Every day these administrative stays are in effect is a day the American people are denied what they voted for.”
That language tracks a consistent administration argument: TPS was designed as a temporary shield, not a permanent residency program, and courts that blocked its termination were substituting their own policy preferences for the executive branch’s statutory authority.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin made the same point more sharply during an earlier phase of the South Sudan litigation, when a different judge had temporarily blocked the termination. McLaughlin called that order “yet another lawless and activist order from the federal judiciary who continues to usurp the President’s constitutional authority,” Fox News reported at the time.
“TPS was never designed to be permanent.”
That earlier stay, issued by Judge Angel Kelley, had cited “legally complex” issues and “serious, long-term consequences, including the risk of deadly harm” if South Sudanese nationals were returned. Judge Saris’s Friday ruling effectively overrode that concern, siding with DHS’s position that the executive branch holds broad discretion over TPS designations.
Friday’s rulings did not arrive in a vacuum. Both followed a 6-3 Supreme Court decision in June that curtailed lower courts’ ability to block DHS from terminating TPS designations. That ruling, which addressed TPS for Haiti and Syria, removed the legal footing that had supported many of the nationwide injunctions immigration advocates had secured in federal district courts.
The high court’s decision has had a cascading effect. Since June, federal judges who had previously blocked TPS terminations have begun lifting their orders, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes swiftly. The First Circuit’s decision to overturn earlier TPS blocking orders was one of the first major appellate dominoes to fall.
The pattern has not been uniform, however. Court orders remain in place blocking the administration from ending TPS designations for Ethiopia and Somalia. In the Ethiopia case, a Biden-appointed judge has continued to shield TPS holders even after the Supreme Court ruling, a move that drew sharp criticism from administration officials who accused the judiciary of defying the high court’s clear direction.
Somalia presents a similar holdout. An Obama-appointed judge blocked the Somalia TPS termination in a separate challenge that remains active. Those two outstanding cases represent the last significant judicial obstacles to the administration’s broader TPS rollback.
The numbers tell a story that individual case names cannot. As of August 7, DHS has ended TPS protections for migrants from Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, South Sudan, and Burma, eleven countries in all.
The affected populations vary enormously in size. Roughly 618,000 Venezuelans and 350,000 Haitians account for the vast majority. Honduras adds approximately 72,000. Nepal and Afghanistan contribute about 13,000 and 12,000 respectively. Thousands more come from Syria, Yemen, Cameroon, Nicaragua, South Sudan, and Burma.
The combined figure, more than one million migrants, represents what may be the largest single policy-driven shift in immigration status since TPS was created by Congress in 1990. The program was originally intended to provide short-term relief for nationals of countries struck by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions. Over three decades, successive administrations extended and re-extended designations, sometimes for countries whose original crises had long since evolved or ended.
Critics of TPS expansion argued for years that the program had become a de facto amnesty, a way for hundreds of thousands of people to remain in the United States indefinitely without ever obtaining permanent legal status. The Trump administration has acted on that critique with a speed and scope that caught many immigration advocates off guard.
The legal victories raise a practical question the administration has not yet fully answered: when do removals begin? Users on X have pressed DHS officials on exactly that point, asking how many affected migrants have already left the country voluntarily and when the government plans to begin enforcing the terminations through deportation proceedings.
DHS has not publicly announced a removal timeline for any of the eleven countries whose TPS designations have been terminated. The gap between a legal ruling and an operational enforcement campaign can be wide. Identifying, locating, and processing more than a million people whose legal status has changed is a logistical challenge that will test the capacity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the immigration courts, and the broader detention system.
The administration’s supporters want action, not just courtroom wins. The legal authority is now largely in hand. The question is whether DHS will use it, and how quickly.
Meanwhile, the Ethiopia and Somalia cases remain unresolved. If those courts follow the pattern set by Boston and Chicago, the administration will have cleared every judicial roadblock to its TPS rollback. If they hold firm, the resulting split could send the issue back to the appellate courts, or even to the Supreme Court again.
The broader judicial landscape has shifted decisively in the administration’s favor on immigration enforcement. Federal judges across multiple jurisdictions have shown increasing willingness to defer to executive authority when the legal framework supports it.
TPS was built on a simple premise: when a country suffers a catastrophe, its nationals already in the United States should not be forced to return to danger. That premise was never meant to guarantee permanent residence. Congress wrote sunset provisions into the statute. The executive branch was supposed to review conditions and let designations expire when the original crisis passed.
For decades, that review process became a rubber stamp. Administrations of both parties renewed TPS designations year after year, sometimes for countries that had held elections, rebuilt infrastructure, and resumed normal governance. The result was a population of long-term residents who had built lives, raised families, and established roots in the United States, but who had never been granted a permanent legal pathway.
The Trump administration’s position is that enforcing the statute as written is not cruelty. It is the law. Whether one agrees with that framing or not, the courts have now largely endorsed it.
The federal judiciary’s willingness to let the executive branch exercise its statutory authority, rather than substituting judicial policy preferences, marks a significant shift from the early months of the administration, when district courts routinely blocked immigration actions with nationwide injunctions.
Eleven countries. More than a million people. A Supreme Court decision that reset the legal playing field. And a DHS general counsel who frames every lifted injunction as a promise kept to voters.
Temporary means temporary, unless no one bothers to enforce it. Someone finally bothered.
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