A federal judge appointed by President Biden removed the final court order blocking the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopia, clearing every remaining judicial obstacle to TPS terminations across more than a dozen countries.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy on Tuesday lifted the administrative stay that had prevented the Department of Homeland Security from revoking TPS for Ethiopian nationals, the Washington Examiner reported. Murphy had been the last judge in the country still holding out on allowing TPS to end for any of the affected nations. His order means DHS can now proceed with terminations for every country on its list.
DHS General Counsel James Percival celebrated the ruling on X, posting a meme saying he was "marked safe from TPS judges today" and writing:
"Judge Brian Murphy just lifted the stay of Ethiopia TPS termination. All TPS terminations are in effect!"
The announcement caps a months-long legal campaign by the Trump administration to wind down a program that critics say had drifted far from its original purpose, providing short-term shelter for foreign nationals whose home countries faced natural disasters or armed conflict.
Murphy's decision did not happen in a vacuum. In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the executive branch's decision to revoke TPS was "unreviewable by courts in nearly all instances." The ruling left open only a narrow lane for constitutional challenges, effectively telling lower courts to stop second-guessing the administration on TPS policy.
That decision should have ended the fight. It did not, at least not immediately. A handful of district court judges continued to delay TPS terminations for individual countries even after the high court spoke. Murphy was among them.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus objected loudly when the Supreme Court handed down its trio of 6-3 rulings, but the legal landscape shifted decisively in the administration's favor.
Late last week, Judge Allison Burroughs, an Obama appointee, lifted her own administrative stay on TPS termination for Somalia, removing the second-to-last judicial block. That ruling left Murphy's Ethiopia hold as the sole remaining obstacle.
Burroughs's reversal followed the same trajectory seen in other Obama-appointed judges who stepped aside once the Supreme Court made clear that TPS revocation sat squarely within executive authority.
The Trump administration has terminated TPS for more than a dozen countries. Just The News reported that the list includes Somalia, Honduras, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Venezuela, and others, a sweeping rollback of protections that previous administrations had renewed for years, sometimes decades.
Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin noted that Murphy's stay was the last block in place for Trump's TPS terminations.
The pattern of Biden-appointed judges reversing their own blocks on TPS tells its own story. Judges who initially moved to stop the administration found themselves boxed in by a Supreme Court majority that refused to let lower courts substitute their policy preferences for the executive branch's statutory authority.
Murphy did keep one constitutional claim alive, allowing TPS activists to continue pressing a single legal argument against the administration. The specifics of that claim were not detailed. But the practical effect is clear: TPS holders from Ethiopia and every other affected country now face the end of their protected status while the case moves forward.
The TPS victory is not the administration's only live immigration battle in the courts. Federal appeals courts remain divided over whether the Trump administration's mandatory detention policy for illegal immigrants is lawful. The Supreme Court is considering petitions on that question and could take up oral arguments as early as October, when its next term begins.
Earlier this year, federal courts cleared the administration to end Burma's TPS protections, part of the broader trend of judges falling in line with the Supreme Court's direction on executive immigration authority.
For years, TPS became a de facto permanent residency program, renewed automatically by successive administrations regardless of whether conditions in the designated countries had actually improved. What was designed as temporary relief hardened into an entitlement that neither Congress nor the courts were willing to revisit. The Trump administration forced the question, and the Supreme Court answered it: the executive branch gets to decide.
Now every district judge in the country has accepted that answer. The last holdout just stepped aside.
When even Biden-appointed judges conclude they cannot block a policy, the legal argument against it was never as strong as its defenders claimed.
