A federal judge in Boston who once blocked the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals has now reversed course and lifted her own stay, bound, she wrote, by a Supreme Court decision that stripped lower courts of authority to second-guess the executive branch on TPS.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, ended the administrative stay on Friday, clearing the path for immigration officials to begin removing TPS protections for roughly 2,471 Somali nationals currently living in the United States under the program. Another 1,383 have pending TPS applications, Fox News reported, citing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services figures.
The ruling marks a direct downstream victory from the Supreme Court's June decision in Mullin v. Doe, which held that the TPS statute bars federal courts from reviewing certain non-constitutional decisions by the administration to terminate TPS designations. That decision, handed down in a trio of 6-3 immigration rulings, has already reshaped the legal landscape for TPS challenges nationwide.
Judge Burroughs did not pretend the case was easy. She acknowledged that the Somali plaintiffs, four unnamed nationals and two advocacy groups, had made what she called a "convincing showing" that they would suffer "irreparable harm" if TPS protections were stripped. She went further, noting that the balance of hardships and the public interest also favored the plaintiffs.
But none of that mattered after Mullin. Burroughs wrote that she was "bound... to view things through the Mullin prism," a frank admission that the Supreme Court had removed the legal tools she had previously used to block the administration's action.
The concession is notable precisely because of who made it. Burroughs was appointed by President Obama, and she had already demonstrated willingness to intervene on behalf of the Somali plaintiffs by issuing the original stay. Her decision to lift it despite her stated sympathy for their case underscores just how sweeping the Supreme Court's Mullin ruling was.
Other judges appointed by Democratic presidents have reached similar conclusions in recent weeks. Across multiple federal courts, Biden-appointed judges have reversed lower court blocks on TPS terminations, following the same Supreme Court precedent that left Burroughs no room to maneuver.
The administration's legal position has been straightforward from the start. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in January that Somalia's TPS designation would end, stating that conditions in the country had improved enough to justify terminating the humanitarian protections. Somalia's TPS designation dated back to 1991, more than three decades of what was designed as a temporary program.
Congress created TPS in 1990 as a short-term shield for foreign nationals whose home countries were hit by armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. The program was never intended as a path to permanent residency. Yet successive administrations allowed designations to roll over for years, then decades, turning "temporary" into something that looked permanent in all but name.
The Somali plaintiffs did not limit their challenge to procedural grounds. They alleged that the administration's decision to end TPS was motivated by racial and ethnic bias against non-white immigrants. In their filings, they pointed to past statements by President Trump, including descriptions of Somalis as "garbage" and "low IQ people."
The Mullin v. Doe ruling addressed that line of attack as well. The Supreme Court's June decision also rejected an equal protection challenge to Noem's termination of Haiti's TPS designation, the Washington Examiner reported. That precedent made it all but impossible for the Somali plaintiffs to sustain a bias-based claim through the federal courts.
The Supreme Court had already cleared the administration to end TPS for Haiti and Syria in the same set of rulings, establishing a pattern that lower courts have followed with increasing speed.
For the plaintiffs, the legal options are narrowing fast. Judge Burroughs's ruling does not appear to include any transition timeline or phased wind-down for affected Somali nationals, though the order's full operational details remain unclear. What is clear is that the judicial roadblock is gone.
The administration's move on Somalia is not an isolated action. It is part of a broader effort to unwind TPS designations across 13 countries. Somalia joins Cameroon, Ethiopia, and South Sudan as African nations where TPS has been terminated. The full list also includes Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Myanmar, Breitbart News reported, citing Business Insider.
The scale of the effort reflects a fundamental policy shift. For years, advocacy groups and sympathetic judges treated TPS designations as functionally irrevocable, using injunctions and stays to block any attempt at termination. The Mullin ruling dismantled that strategy by placing TPS decisions squarely within the executive branch's discretion, beyond the reach of routine judicial review.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has sharply criticized the Supreme Court's TPS rulings, but the political objections have not translated into legislative action capable of overriding the court's interpretation of the statute.
Meanwhile, Judge Burroughs's decision adds to a growing line of federal court rulings clearing the path for the administration to enforce its TPS terminations without further judicial interference.
The core question the TPS debate raises is not complicated. When Congress passed the program in 1990, it used the word "temporary" for a reason. A designation triggered by civil war or natural disaster was supposed to last until the emergency passed, not until the next generation grew up under it.
Somalia's designation ran for thirty-five years. Whatever conditions justified it in 1991, and they were severe, the administration now says those conditions have changed. The plaintiffs disagree. But the Supreme Court has decided that the executive branch, not a district judge in Boston, gets to make that call.
Judge Burroughs followed the law even when she plainly sympathized with the people on the other side of it. That is how the system is supposed to work. The larger point is that "temporary" should mean temporary, and it took a Supreme Court ruling and three decades to enforce that plain English.
