A federal judge in Boston lifted a stay on Friday that had blocked the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, handing the Trump administration a significant legal victory in its effort to wind down humanitarian immigration protections it says are no longer justified.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, concluded that the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Mullin v. Doe left her with no viable legal basis to keep blocking the administration’s action, even as she acknowledged the strength of the plaintiffs’ case. The decision clears the way for DHS to proceed with terminating Somalia’s TPS designation, a status the East African nation has held since 1991.
The ruling affects a population that sources at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services previously told Fox News Digital includes 2,471 Somali nationals currently holding TPS and another 1,383 with pending applications. Somali nationals who lack another lawful basis to remain in the United States now face potential deportation.
Judge Burroughs did not hide her sympathy for the plaintiffs, four unnamed Somali nationals and two advocacy groups, including African Communities Together. In her written ruling, she said she was “bound… to view things through the Mullin prism,” a reference to the high court’s June decision that barred judicial review of certain non-constitutional challenges to TPS terminations.
Her language was striking for a judge effectively siding with the government. Burroughs wrote:
“Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is withheld… and the balance of hardships and the public interest also favor Plaintiffs, given that the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden.”
Yet she lifted the stay anyway. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruling in Mullin v. Doe had curtailed lower courts’ ability to review DHS efforts to end TPS designations for nationals of multiple countries. That decision found that an equal protection challenge to TPS termination was unlikely to succeed, effectively pulling the legal floor out from under the plaintiffs’ primary argument.
After the Mullin ruling, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint raising new constitutional claims under the Fifth Amendment, alleging that the administration’s decision to end Somalia’s TPS designation was motivated by racial and national-origin discrimination. They sought emergency relief. Burroughs issued a temporary administrative stay earlier in August to consider those claims.
But on Friday, she concluded that even the discrimination argument could not survive the Supreme Court’s framework. Just The News reported that Burroughs wrote in her ruling: “Though Plaintiffs lay out a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist… after Mullin, which included a constitutional race-discrimination claim, the Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim.”
That is a remarkable admission from a judge appointed by President Obama. She found the plaintiffs’ evidence of bias persuasive, and still ruled against them, because the Supreme Court left her no room to do otherwise.
The Trump administration moved to end Somalia’s TPS designation in January, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem published a notice terminating the status. Noem argued that conditions in Somalia had improved enough to end the humanitarian protections that had been in place for more than three decades.
That argument drew immediate pushback. Plaintiffs and advocacy groups pointed to ongoing instability in Somalia, including fighting between Somali government forces and al-Shabaab militants. They contended that the administration’s real motive was not a sober assessment of country conditions but hostility toward non-White immigrants.
The broader pattern of TPS terminations across multiple countries gave that argument some surface plausibility. The administration has moved to end TPS for nationals of 13 countries. The Supreme Court’s June ruling on Haitians and Syrians, stripping deportation protections from roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, set the template that Burroughs was now compelled to follow for Somalis.
But the legal question is distinct from the political one. TPS was designed as a temporary measure, the “T” stands for something, and the statute gives the executive branch broad discretion to determine when conditions in a designated country have changed enough to warrant termination. The Supreme Court reinforced that discretion in Mullin v. Doe, and lower courts are now bound by it.
The Somalia ruling does not exist in isolation. It is the latest in a series of legal victories that have steadily expanded the Trump administration’s ability to enforce immigration law and roll back protections that critics say had become permanent in all but name.
TPS designations for South Sudan and Myanmar have also been terminated. Newsmax reported that only Ethiopia’s TPS termination remains blocked by a federal judge, making it the sole holdout among the countries the administration has targeted.
Meanwhile, the administration has pursued enforcement actions on other fronts. It has revoked thousands of commercial trucker licenses from non-citizens and moved to accelerate denaturalization proceedings by shifting USCIS attorneys to the Justice Department.
Even Biden-appointed judges on the First Circuit have sided with the administration in overturning earlier TPS blocking orders, a sign that the legal landscape has shifted decisively since the Supreme Court weighed in.
For the administration’s supporters, the pattern reflects a straightforward principle: temporary means temporary. For its opponents, the rapid unwinding of protections that have been in place for decades threatens communities that have built lives, businesses, and families in the United States.
The immediate practical consequences remain unclear. DHS has not announced a specific effective date for when Somalia’s TPS termination will take effect following Friday’s ruling. The roughly 2,471 current holders and 1,383 applicants face an uncertain timeline.
Some may have other lawful bases to remain in the country, green cards, pending asylum claims, or other immigration statuses. Others may not. The ruling does not automatically trigger deportation, but it removes the legal shield that had prevented the government from acting.
The plaintiffs’ amended complaint remains pending, and further appeals are possible. But with the Supreme Court having already narrowed the available legal theories, the path forward for TPS defenders grows steeper with each ruling.
The administration has also faced questions about the operational capacity to carry out large-scale enforcement actions across multiple TPS populations simultaneously. Whether DHS can process terminations for Somalis, Haitians, Syrians, and others at the same time, while managing the legal and logistical demands of each, is an open question that the courts have not addressed.
The plaintiffs’ strongest emotional argument, that the administration targeted Somalis out of racial animus, ran into a wall built by the Supreme Court itself. The plaintiffs cited statements attributed to President Trump describing Somalis in derogatory terms, including calling them “garbage” and “low IQ people.” The Washington Examiner reported Trump’s public remarks about Somalis, including his statement: “The Somalians, what they’ve done to Minnesota, the Somalians, crooked as h***. I don’t want them in our country.”
Judge Burroughs acknowledged the force of this evidence. She said the plaintiffs laid out “a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist.” But she concluded that after Mullin, which itself involved a constitutional race-discrimination claim, she could not find a legal path to ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor on the merits.
That distinction matters. The judge did not say the plaintiffs were wrong about the statements. She said the law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, did not give her the authority to block a TPS termination on that basis. The statute vests that discretion in the executive branch, and the high court has now made clear that courts cannot second-guess it through the lens of equal protection claims.
Critics will argue that this framework immunizes discriminatory motives from judicial review. Supporters will argue that it restores the separation of powers the TPS statute was designed to reflect. Both sides now operate on terrain the Supreme Court has mapped.
Somalia’s TPS designation has been in place since 1991, thirty-five years. Whatever emergency justified it in the early 1990s, the designation had long since hardened into something its creators never intended: a permanent quasi-amnesty renewed by bureaucratic inertia across multiple administrations of both parties.
The Trump administration’s effort to end these designations is not novel in principle. Previous administrations considered and sometimes initiated TPS terminations. What is different now is the willingness to follow through, and a Supreme Court willing to affirm that the executive branch has the legal authority to do so.
Judge Burroughs, to her credit, followed the law even when she plainly wished it pointed somewhere else. That is how the system is supposed to work. The question now is whether the political system, Congress, advocacy groups, affected communities, will respond through the democratic process or continue to rely on courtroom strategies that the Supreme Court has foreclosed.
When “temporary” lasts thirty-five years, the word has lost all meaning. A court finally said so.
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