A federal judge handed President Donald Trump a massive legal victory that clears a path for his administration to bring deportation protections for over 5,000 Ethiopians living in the United States to an end. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston, Massachusetts lifted the final judicial block preventing the Department of Homeland Security from halting Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians.
The decision will give the Trump administration a win in its ongoing efforts to roll back humanitarian immigration programs that were expanded during President Joe Biden’s time in the White House. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could end similar protections for thousands of immigrants from Haiti and Syria.
The ruling, supported by a 6-3 conservative majority vote, placed strict limits on the ability of lower courts to get involved with DHS decisions ending Temporary Protected Status designations for individual countries. This is a huge blow to activist judges who have been abusing their power to throw blocks in the way of the administration pushing Trump’s agenda instead of impartially upholding the law.
According to a report from Trending Politics News, James Percival, DHS’s general counsel, took to social media to celebrate the ruling. “All TPS terminations are in effect!” he said in his post. Temporary Protected Status enables eligible foreign nationals from countries that are experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions to stay in the U.S. on a temporary basis and obtain a work authorization.
Former President Biden’s administration granted TPS to eligible Ethiopians who were already living here in the U.S. back in 2022, stating that armed conflict and humanitarian conditions in the African country were terrible, thus sending folks back could put their lives in danger. DHS later moved to stop those protections after determining that conditions in Ethiopia no longer met the criteria for continuing protection from deportation.
Murphy first blocked the administration’s move in April after several nationals from Ethiopia and African Communities Together both challenged the decision. Murphy stated at the time that Homeland Security failed to properly follow statutory procedures, offering what they referred to as a “pretextual” explanation for ending protections.
Following the SCOTUS ruling in June, Murphy temporarily kept his block in place while considering if other arguments could stop the Trump administration from stopping the program. One of the arguments Murphy thought through was whether DHS actually had the authority to terminate TPS protections. The plaintiffs in the case said that the law creating TPS gave that power to the attorney general, not DHS, which was created eleven years after.
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Judges who have handled similar challenges involving migrants from South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia rejected the validity of that argument. Murphy did the same in his case. He tossed out that claim along with several other challenges, clearing the way for the administration to end Ethiopian TPS designation, providing yet another much needed courtroom victory for the president.