A federal judge just removed the last legal barrier protecting over 5,000 Ethiopians from deportation.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, sitting in Boston, officially lifted his previous court order that had been preventing the Department of Homeland Security from pulling the plug on Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopian nationals living in America. As reported, this gives the Trump White House a colossal courtroom victory in its broader campaign to dismantle humanitarian immigration programs that ballooned under Joe Biden's presidency.
And this isn't happening in a vacuum, folks. Back in June, the Supreme Court sided with the administration in a 6 to 3 decision, giving the green light to strip similar protections from thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. That ruling, backed by the court's conservative majority, severely restricted lower court judges from meddling in DHS choices about which countries qualify for TPS coverage.
That's a brutal blow to judges who have been playing political football with immigration policy instead of doing their actual jobs.
DHS general counsel James Percival was clearly feeling himself after the ruling dropped, hopping on social media to declare victory. His message was short and sweet. "All TPS terminations are in effect!" he posted.
So how did we get here? TPS allows foreign nationals from countries dealing with armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extreme crises to remain stateside temporarily and get work permits. Biden's team granted that status to qualifying Ethiopians back in 2022, pointing to violent conflict and dire humanitarian conditions in the African nation as justification. Sending people back, they argued, could be a death sentence.
But DHS under Trump later concluded that Ethiopia's situation no longer met the bar for continued protection. That triggered the legal fireworks.
Murphy initially blocked the termination back in April after Ethiopian nationals and the organization African Communities Together filed challenges. The judge said at the time that Homeland Security had botched its procedural obligations and offered what he called a "pretextual" rationale for cutting protections.
After the Supreme Court's June bombshell, Murphy kept his block temporarily alive while weighing additional legal theories. One particularly creative argument from the plaintiffs claimed that TPS termination authority legally belongs to the attorney general, not DHS, since the agency was created a full eleven years after the TPS statute. Judges handling comparable cases involving South Sudanese, Burmese, and Somali migrants had already shot that theory down. Murphy followed suit, rejecting it along with every other remaining challenge.
With all obstacles now obliterated, the administration is free to formally end Ethiopian TPS designation. For a president who has faced an avalanche of courtroom resistance on immigration, this is a clean, undeniable W. The scoreboard is shifting, and the legal walls that activist judges built around Biden's immigration expansion are crumbling one by one.
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