An Obama-appointed federal judge just flipped her own ruling and cleared the path for Trump to deport Somali nationals.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, who was placed on the bench by Barack Obama himself, lifted a stay she had previously issued that shielded Somali immigrants holding Temporary Protected Status from removal proceedings. The reversal came after the Supreme Court dropped a bombshell ruling in June that essentially told lower courts to keep their hands off DHS decisions about ending TPS protections, according to reports.
Here is where it gets really juicy. That Supreme Court decision, known as Mullin v. Doe, involved Haitian and Syrian nationals and established that federal law broadly prevents judges from second-guessing the Department of Homeland Security when it pulls the plug on TPS designations. The ruling has since become a sledgehammer that the Trump administration is swinging at legal challenges from every other TPS population, and it is working beautifully for them.
The court also shot down a separate legal argument claiming that former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem violated equal protection guarantees when she axed Haiti's TPS designation. Not a good day for the open borders legal team.
Somalia originally received its TPS designation way back in 1991 because of rampant instability and violence in the country. On January 14, 2026, Noem formally pulled the plug on that designation. Plaintiffs rushed to federal court in Massachusetts on March 9, and four days later Burroughs temporarily froze everything while both sides prepared their arguments.
Then the Supreme Court spoke in Mullin v. Doe on June 25, and the Trump administration immediately asked Burroughs to lift the stay. She obliged, finding that the plaintiffs could not demonstrate they were likely to win their case, which is the basic threshold for keeping an injunction alive.
Now here is the spicy part. Burroughs actually acknowledged that the plaintiffs made a "convincing showing" that losing TPS could cause serious harm. But she ruled that potential consequences simply did not outweigh the fact that these folks had virtually no chance of prevailing on the legal merits. Tough break.
The plaintiffs tried one more angle, pointing to Trump's own inflammatory comments about Somali immigrants as evidence of discriminatory intent. And the president certainly did not hold back. Trump has openly blasted Somali immigration, particularly after a major fraud investigation in Minnesota connected to members of that community. He called Somalis "crooked as hell," referenced Rep. Ilhan Omar, and flatly stated he does not want them in the country. He also claimed Somalia barely has a functioning government, saying people there "just run around killing each other."
Those comments are certainly explosive, but the court was not persuaded they changed the legal calculus. The bottom line is that TPS protections for Somali nationals are now on the chopping block, and the legal firewall that immigration advocates were counting on has been completely demolished by the Supreme Court. Trump's deportation machine just got another green light.
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