A federal appeals court panel dominated by Biden appointees reversed two district court orders that had blocked the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Ethiopia and South Sudan, a pair of rulings the administration called "a win for the rule of law and common sense."
The First Circuit Court of Appeals issued nearly identical rulings Wednesday vacating orders from U.S. District Judges Brian Murphy and Patti Saris, both of whom had moved late last week to freeze the administration's TPS terminations. The appellate panel, Judges Julie Rikelman and Seth Aframe, both Biden appointees, alongside Trump appointee Joshua Dunlap, found that the lower court orders directly conflicted with the Supreme Court's ruling in Mullin v. Doe, which bars courts from blocking TPS terminations on non-constitutional grounds.
The result strips away the legal shield two district judges had placed between the administration and its authority to wind down a program the Department of Homeland Security says was never meant to last forever. And it does so on the strength of a precedent the Supreme Court set just weeks earlier, one that lower courts, in DHS's view, were openly defying.
Late last week, Judge Murphy blocked the administration's move to end TPS for Ethiopian nationals, and Judge Saris did the same for South Sudanese migrants. Both judges framed their orders as procedural, measures to preserve the status quo while they weighed whether the plaintiffs, led by the New York-based immigrant advocacy group African Communities Together, could amend their complaints to pursue constitutional claims.
The plaintiffs had originally challenged the TPS terminations under the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal law that governs how agencies make and change rules. They alleged DHS unlawfully ended protections. But the Supreme Court's June ruling in Mullin v. Doe closed that door. The justices held that a judicial-review bar written into the TPS statute applies to "all non-constitutional claims" challenging the homeland security secretary's decision to end a TPS designation.
That left one narrow path: constitutional claims. The plaintiffs allege racial discrimination motivated the administration's TPS decisions. Murphy and Saris kept the blocking orders in place while they considered whether to let the plaintiffs rewrite their cases around that theory.
The First Circuit said that was a bridge too far. In its ruling, the panel wrote that Mullin "held that 'the TPS statute's judicial-review bar applies to all non-constitutional claims' challenging the Secretary of [Homeland Security's] determination with respect to the termination of a TPS designation." The lower court orders, the panel concluded, could not stand while resting on the very type of claims the Supreme Court had already placed off-limits.
Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan, whose state was involved in the litigation, told Fox News Digital the rulings followed logically from what the Supreme Court already decided:
"These are clear wins for President Trump following his big win at the U.S. Supreme Court, explaining that district courts are not supposed to second guess TPS terminations, and even as this plays out, we're moving towards the end of this litigation because district courts should not be hearing these disputes, and that's what the Supreme Court said."
Wessan added a blunt bottom line for the plaintiffs' remaining legal options: "If they want to let the plaintiffs amend their complaint, they're allowed to do that, but in the meantime, TPS is over."
Before the First Circuit acted, the Trump administration had already signaled it viewed the lower court orders as illegitimate. DHS General Counsel James Percival wrote on X that Judge Murphy's order amounted to "mutiny against the Supreme Court." He described Judge Saris's ruling as "open defiance" of the justices' decision in Mullin.
A DHS spokesperson reinforced the administration's position, framing the reversals as long overdue corrections:
"Temporary Protected Status is exactly that, temporary. For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent."
The spokesperson called the First Circuit's rulings "a win for the rule of law and common sense." That language tracks with the administration's broader argument: that TPS, a program Congress designed as a short-term shelter for foreign nationals whose home countries face armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions, has been stretched by successive administrations into something resembling permanent residency, without any vote in Congress to make it so.
The pattern of district courts issuing orders that conflict with higher court precedent has become a recurring frustration for the administration. In a separate case earlier this month, an Obama-appointed judge voided a Trump IRS settlement and referred his attorney to the Florida Bar, another instance of a lower court judge taking aggressive action against the administration's legal positions.
What makes Wednesday's outcome difficult for the administration's critics to dismiss is who delivered it. Two of the three judges on the panel owe their seats to President Biden. Rikelman and Aframe were not Trump appointees carrying water for the president who elevated them. They applied the Supreme Court's precedent and found the district court orders wanting.
That fact matters because the immigration litigation landscape has increasingly resembled forum-shopping. Advocacy groups file in districts where they expect sympathetic judges. Administrations of both parties have benefited from, and complained about, the practice. When Biden-appointed appellate judges reverse orders issued by judges who blocked a Trump policy, it cuts against the claim that the courts are simply doing the bidding of whichever president chose them.
The Supreme Court itself has been active on immigration questions this term. The justices recently ruled that migrants standing in Mexico have not legally "arrived" in the United States, another decision that reinforced the administration's enforcement posture. The Mullin v. Doe decision fits the same pattern: the high court drawing clear lines around what lower courts can and cannot do when the executive branch acts on immigration.
Fox News Digital reached out to the offices of both Judge Murphy and Judge Saris for comment. Neither response was reported.
The practical effect of Wednesday's rulings is straightforward: the legal barrier preventing the administration from ending TPS for Ethiopian and South Sudanese nationals has been removed. The district courts can still consider whether to let the plaintiffs amend their complaints to pursue constitutional claims, specifically, the allegation that racial discrimination drove the termination decisions. But as Wessan noted, those proceedings will unfold without the blocking orders in place. The terminations proceed while the litigation continues.
That distinction matters for the thousands of TPS holders from both countries. Temporary Protected Status allows foreign nationals to live and work in the United States legally while conditions in their home countries are deemed too dangerous for return. Once a designation is terminated, recipients lose that authorization and face the same removal processes as any other foreign national without lawful status.
The Supreme Court is also weighing the administration's effort to terminate temporary protections for Haitian and Syrian migrants, according to Fox News, which means the legal framework established in Mullin will continue to shape how courts handle TPS challenges across multiple nationalities.
The broader fight over judicial authority in immigration cases shows no sign of cooling. Justice Alito recently called a Supreme Court birthright citizenship ruling a "serious mistake" with consequences he described in stark terms, a reminder that even within the high court, the boundaries of immigration law remain contested ground.
African Communities Together and the individual TPS recipients named in both lawsuits still have the constitutional discrimination claims available to them. Whether those claims survive scrutiny is an open question. But the broader legal architecture is now clear: district courts cannot use procedural orders to freeze TPS terminations when the only claims on the table are the kind the Supreme Court has already said fall outside judicial review.
Meanwhile, the administration continues to press its position across multiple fronts. Trump recently petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the $83.3 million E. Jean Carroll defamation judgment, adding another high-profile case to a docket already heavy with disputes over executive authority.
Congress created TPS as a temporary program. The Supreme Court told lower courts they cannot second-guess the decision to end it. Two Biden-appointed judges just enforced that rule. At some point, the word "temporary" has to mean something, and Wednesday, it did.