Federal judges in Boston and Chicago handed the Trump administration two more wins on Temporary Protected Status, clearing DHS to strip deportation protections from Burmese and South Sudanese nationals, and leaving court orders in place for just two countries out of a dozen targeted.
The twin rulings, both issued Friday, mark the near-total collapse of the legal wall that immigrant-advocacy groups had built to keep TPS designations alive. A federal judge in Chicago ruled that the Department of Homeland Security can proceed with terminating protections for approximately 3,700 Burmese nationals. The same day, a federal judge in Boston lifted a previous order that had blocked the end of TPS for South Sudanese nationals.
DHS General Counsel James Percival announced the victories in a post on X, calling the Burma decision the administration's latest legal win. Only Ethiopia and Somalia now remain under court orders that prevent DHS from ending their TPS designations.
The scale of the administration's success is hard to overstate. As of Aug. 7, DHS has ended TPS protections covering more than one million migrants from eleven countries: Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, South Sudan, and Burma. The largest populations affected include roughly 618,000 Venezuelans, approximately 350,000 Haitians, around 72,000 Hondurans, some 13,000 Nepalis, and about 12,000 Afghans, plus thousands more from several other countries.
TPS, Temporary Protected Status, is a federal program that allows nationals of designated countries to remain in the United States when conditions back home, such as armed conflict or natural disaster, are deemed too dangerous for return. The designation was always meant to be temporary. Critics have long argued that successive administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, renewed TPS so routinely that "temporary" became permanent in all but name.
That pattern is now broken. The Trump administration moved systematically to terminate designations country by country, and the federal courts, after years of blocking those efforts, have largely stepped aside.
The turning point came in June 2026, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe that federal district courts lack jurisdiction to review challenges to TPS termination decisions brought under the Administrative Procedure Act. The conservative-majority decision affirmed DHS's authority to end protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants and, more broadly, curtailed the ability of lower courts to block TPS terminations altogether.
The ruling did not stop every judge from trying. U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, who had previously blocked the South Sudan termination, issued a temporary stay even after the Supreme Court's decision. Percival responded sharply.
"Another rogue district judge just postponed the termination of TPS for South Sudan. This is open defiance of the Supreme Court, plain and simple!"
Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan echoed the frustration:
"The Supreme Court ruled that district courts lack jurisdiction to review terminations of temporary protected status. I'm confused why some district courts have not yet removed any remaining road blocks."
Judge Saris ultimately lifted her order, clearing the path for Friday's outcome. The Boston ruling now allows DHS to move forward on South Sudan, matching the Chicago court's green light on Burma.
The administration's approach relied on a two-track strategy: terminate TPS designations at the agency level while fighting in court to strip judges of the authority to second-guess those decisions. The Supreme Court's acceptance of the appeal, in cases styled Noem v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, came on an expedited schedule, with oral arguments set for the second week of April 2026. The Court's willingness to fast-track the cases signaled how seriously the justices took the jurisdictional question.
Hans A. von Spakovsky, a legal commentator, framed the stakes plainly:
"Activist judges have been defying the Trump administration and making temporary protected status all but permanent."
That defiance now has a shelf life. With the Supreme Court's June ruling as settled law, district judges who continue to block TPS terminations face reversal on appeal, and public rebuke from the administration.
Court orders blocking TPS termination for Ethiopia and Somalia are still in effect. The specific courts, judges, and procedural posture of those cases are not detailed in available reporting, but the administration's track record over the past several months suggests those orders are unlikely to survive long. Every other injunction has fallen, some after the Supreme Court ruling, others after Biden-appointed judges themselves reversed lower court blocks on TPS terminations.
The political fallout from the TPS rollback has been fierce. New York City's mayor refused to enforce the Supreme Court's ruling on Haitian and Syrian deportation protections, and DHS Secretary Mullin has publicly defended the administration's deportation plans in the wake of the Court's decision. On X, users pressed the administration on what comes next, when removals will begin and how many migrants have already left the country. Those questions remain unanswered.
The administration has not released figures on voluntary departures or removal timelines for the affected populations. Whether DHS has the operational capacity to locate, process, and remove more than a million people whose legal status has now expired is an open question that no official has publicly addressed.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 as a humanitarian safety valve, a way to pause deportations when a country was hit by war, earthquake, or epidemic. The statute gave the executive branch sole discretion to designate and terminate protections. For decades, administrations of both parties renewed designations almost reflexively, and advocacy groups sued whenever a president tried to end them. The result was a system in which hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals lived in the United States for ten, twenty, even thirty years under a status Congress labeled "temporary."
The Trump administration's position is straightforward: the law says "temporary," and DHS has the authority to decide when temporary ends. The Supreme Court agreed. The lower courts, one by one, have fallen in line. With Friday's rulings on Burma and South Sudan, eleven of thirteen targeted countries have lost their TPS designations.
The broader immigration enforcement picture continues to shift. The same administration that ended TPS for over a million migrants has also moved on executive orders addressing birthright citizenship and birth tourism, signaling that TPS is one piece of a larger effort to tighten immigration law and restore the boundaries Congress wrote into the statute books.
When a program called "temporary" lasts a generation, the problem is not the president who finally ends it, it is the ones who never did.
