A federal judge just removed the last legal barrier blocking Trump from stripping deportation protections for over 5,000 Ethiopians.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, sitting in Boston, lifted the sole remaining judicial obstacle on Tuesday, giving the Department of Homeland Security a green light to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopian nationals residing in the country. As reported, this hands the Trump administration yet another courtroom trophy in its relentless campaign to dismantle humanitarian immigration programs that ballooned under Joe Biden.
And the dominoes are falling FAST. This ruling arrives on the heels of a Supreme Court decision in June, where the court's 6 to 3 conservative bloc severely restricted lower courts from meddling with DHS calls to ax TPS designations for specific countries. That earlier case involved protections for migrants from Haiti and Syria.
DHS General Counsel James Percival was absolutely giddy about Tuesday's outcome. He hopped on social media to declare that all TPS terminations are now fully operational. Translation: the legal floodgates are wide open.
Here's the backstory. TPS is a program that lets foreign nationals from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other severe crises stay in the U.S. temporarily while holding down jobs legally. The Biden administration first extended these protections to qualifying Ethiopians back in 2022, pointing to armed conflict and dire humanitarian conditions in the African nation. DHS later concluded those conditions no longer warranted blanket deportation shielding.
Judge Murphy actually blocked the administration's move back in April after Ethiopian nationals and the group African Communities Together mounted a legal challenge. Murphy scolded DHS at the time, saying the agency botched its statutory procedures and offered a bogus explanation for pulling the protections. But after the Supreme Court weighed in during June, the legal ground shifted dramatically beneath the challengers' feet.
The plaintiffs threw one final Hail Mary, arguing that the 1990 statute creating TPS gave termination authority to the attorney general, not DHS, which didn't even exist until after September 11, 2001. Clever argument, but judges handling parallel cases involving South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia shot it down in recent days. Murphy followed suit on Tuesday.
Now here's the twist. The litigation isn't totally dead. Murphy allowed the plaintiffs to keep pursuing a constitutional claim alleging that racial or national origin bias drove the administration's decision, potentially violating the Fifth Amendment. The challengers contend that dangerous conditions persist in Ethiopia and that the administration has disproportionately gone after protections covering migrants from non-white and non-European nations.
The Trump administration flatly rejects those accusations. Officials have repeatedly insisted that TPS was never designed to function as a backdoor permanent immigration pipeline.
Bottom line: Trump's immigration machine just notched another significant win. The administration now has full authority to proceed with yanking protections that allowed thousands of Ethiopians to live and work here legally. The scoreboard keeps tilting in one direction, and opponents are running out of courtrooms to fight in.
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