Rep. Andy Ogles filed articles of impeachment against federal Judge Allison Burroughs after she issued a stay blocking the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, a move the Tennessee Republican says defied both federal law and the Supreme Court.
Burroughs, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, handed down the administrative stay on Friday. The order temporarily prevents the Department of Homeland Security from terminating TPS protections for Somali nationals, even after the Supreme Court ruled in June in Mullin v. Doe that lower courts have sharply limited authority to block such decisions.
Ogles wasted no time. His impeachment resolution, first obtained by Fox News Digital, accuses Burroughs of having “defied the authority of both Federal law and the Supreme Court.” The resolution frames her conduct as grounds for high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for removing a federal judge from the bench.
The heart of the dispute is whether Burroughs found a backdoor around the high court’s June ruling. The Mullin v. Doe decision significantly curbed the ability of district judges to issue sweeping injunctions halting TPS terminations. But the plaintiff in this case, an organization called African Communities Together, filed an amended complaint raising new claims of racial and national-origin discrimination in the administration’s decision to end TPS for Somalis.
Burroughs used that amended complaint as the basis for her stay. Ogles’ resolution calls this maneuver an attempt “to get around the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe by entertaining spurious allegations of racial and national-origin discrimination against an Administration that has chosen to not renew a single temporary protected status designation.”
That last detail matters. The resolution argues the administration has declined to renew TPS across the board, not singling out any one nationality, which undercuts the discrimination theory at the core of the plaintiffs’ case.
DHS General Counsel James Percival made the administration’s frustration public on Friday, posting on X that judges like Burroughs are acting in open defiance of higher authority.
“There is no serious debate about what is going on in these cases, defiance, obstruction, and delay.”
Percival’s post, as Fox News reported separately, came amid a broader pattern. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed similar administrative stays issued by other district judges who had blocked TPS terminations for Ethiopia and South Sudan. In other words, appellate courts have already begun correcting the same kind of lower-court orders Burroughs just issued.
That pattern raises an obvious question: if the appeals courts keep overturning these stays, why do district judges keep issuing them?
The congressman did not hold back when explaining the resolution to Fox News Digital.
“This judicial activist’s obstruction of the people’s will must be stopped. Judge Burroughs must be impeached.”
Just The News reported that Ogles filed the articles on August 3, 2026, and issued an even sharper public statement, declaring he had “introduced articles of impeachment against radical judicial activist Judge Allison Burroughs for ignoring the Supreme Court and attempting to force mass migration from Somalia into American communities.”
Burroughs was appointed to the bench in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama. Fox News Digital reached out to the Massachusetts district court for comment on the impeachment threat but reported no response.
The broader pattern of lower-court judges defying higher courts on TPS cases has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate. Each time a district judge issues a new stay, it delays enforcement of policies the administration argues are squarely within executive authority, and that the Supreme Court has now affirmed are largely beyond the reach of lower-court injunctions.
Ogles’ resolution is not the first impeachment push by Trump allies in Congress during the president’s second term. Several such resolutions have been filed, though the exact number is unclear. The most prominent earlier effort targeted Judge James Boasberg, but it fell flat after senior House Republicans argued impeachment was not the most effective approach.
That history raises a practical question about Ogles’ chances. House leadership has shown little appetite for impeachment fights with the judiciary, even when the underlying complaints about judicial overreach enjoy broad support within the Republican conference.
Earlier this year, Fox News Digital reported that conservatives planned to launch a sustained campaign to remove what they called “activist judges” from the bench. Whether that campaign gains real traction, or remains a series of symbolic resolutions, depends on whether leadership decides the political cost is worth the constitutional confrontation.
The difficulty of holding federal judges accountable is a sore point for many conservatives. Federal judges serve lifetime appointments and face almost no professional consequences short of impeachment, which requires a House majority vote and a two-thirds Senate conviction. The standard is deliberately high, and it has been met only a handful of times in American history.
That near-total insulation from accountability has produced cases that would end careers in almost any other profession. One federal judge kept her bench after an affair with a police officer in her own chambers, receiving only a private reprimand. A former Wisconsin judge escaped prison after a felony conviction for obstructing an ICE arrest.
Against that backdrop, the question is not whether judges sometimes abuse their authority. The question is whether Congress will ever use the one tool the Constitution gives it to do something about it.
Temporary Protected Status was designed as a short-term humanitarian shield, a way to pause deportations for nationals of countries hit by war, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. Over time, TPS designations have been extended and re-extended for years, sometimes decades, turning what was supposed to be temporary into something that looks permanent.
The Trump administration has moved to end TPS designations broadly, arguing conditions in designated countries no longer justify the protections. The Supreme Court’s Mullin v. Doe ruling in June gave the executive branch significant legal backing for that position by limiting the grounds on which lower courts can intervene.
Plaintiffs like African Communities Together have responded by shifting their legal strategy. Rather than challenging TPS terminations on administrative-law grounds, the approach the Supreme Court largely foreclosed, they now raise equal-protection and discrimination claims, arguing the terminations are motivated by racial animus rather than legitimate policy judgment.
It is a creative legal theory. It is also one that, if accepted broadly, would allow any TPS termination affecting a predominantly non-white population to be blocked indefinitely on discrimination grounds, regardless of what the Supreme Court said about executive authority over TPS.
That is precisely the dynamic Ogles’ resolution targets. And it is why DHS’s Percival framed the issue not as a legal disagreement but as institutional defiance.
Other controversial judicial interventions in immigration enforcement have drawn similar criticism. In one case, a federal judge ordered the release of a convicted plane hijacker despite an active deportation order, a decision that left enforcement officials and the public asking who, exactly, the judiciary believes it is protecting.
Ogles’ impeachment resolution now sits in the House. Whether it advances depends on leadership’s willingness to pick a fight with the judiciary, something Republican leaders have historically been reluctant to do, even when the underlying facts favor their position.
The 1st Circuit’s recent reversals of similar stays suggest the appellate courts may resolve the immediate legal question without Congress needing to act. But the broader pattern, district judges issuing orders that contradict Supreme Court rulings, forcing the government to litigate the same question over and over, will not fix itself through ordinary appeals.
Fox News Digital reported that no response had been received from the Massachusetts district court as of Monday. Burroughs’ stay remains in effect.
The framers gave Congress the impeachment power for a reason. If a federal judge can issue an order that directly contradicts the Supreme Court, face no consequences, and force the elected branches to start from scratch every time, the question stops being about one judge in Massachusetts. It becomes about whether the judiciary answers to anyone at all.
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