Federal judges in Boston and Chicago handed the Trump administration two more victories in its push to dismantle Temporary Protected Status designations, clearing the way to end deportation protections for thousands of Burmese and South Sudanese nationals.
The twin rulings, issued Friday, mean DHS can now move forward with terminating TPS for roughly 3,700 Burmese nationals and more than 230 South Sudanese holders, the latest in a string of courtroom wins that have all but dismantled a program critics say was never meant to serve as a permanent residency workaround.
DHS General Counsel James Percival announced the victories on X, marking what amounts to a near-complete sweep for the administration across more than a dozen countries. As of August 7, DHS has ended TPS protections for migrants from Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, South Sudan, and Burma. Only Ethiopia and Somalia remain shielded by active court orders.
In the South Sudan case, U.S. District Judge Patti Saris rejected a renewed effort by immigrant-rights advocates to preserve the designation. The ruling affects 232 South Sudanese nationals with active TPS status and at least 73 with pending applications, the Washington Examiner reported.
Percival framed the remaining judicial blocks as an affront to the electorate.
"Every day these administrative stays are in effect is a day the American people are denied what they voted for."
That remark underscored the administration's broader argument: TPS was designed as a short-term shield for foreign nationals caught in the United States during a crisis back home, a hurricane, an earthquake, armed conflict. It was never intended as an open-ended grant of residency. Yet successive administrations, particularly the Biden White House, repeatedly extended and expanded the designations until they covered more than a million people with no clear expiration in sight. A Biden-era White House memo mapped out TPS expansion for as many as 3 million noncitizens, a strategy critics said was engineered specifically to tie the hands of any future administration that tried to enforce removals.
The South Sudan ruling did not come without earlier friction. A federal judge in Massachusetts had previously issued an administrative stay blocking the termination, which was originally set to take effect January 6. Judge Angel Kelley at the time called the issues "legally complex" with "serious, long-term consequences, including the risk of deadly harm," Fox News reported.
DHS pushed back hard against that stay. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called it "yet another lawless and activist order from the federal judiciary who continues to usurp the President's constitutional authority." She added plainly: "TPS was never designed to be permanent."
Friday's ruling from Judge Saris effectively overrode that earlier block, siding with the administration's position that DHS has the statutory authority to end designations when the original conditions no longer justify them.
Both Friday rulings trace back to a pivotal Supreme Court decision in June. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the Court's conservative majority curtailed lower courts' ability to prevent DHS from terminating TPS designations. That decision, centered on Haitian TPS holders, upheld the president's authority to end Temporary Protected Status and removed the primary legal weapon advocates had used to keep protections alive through injunction after injunction.
Before that ruling, lower courts had repeatedly frozen the administration's TPS terminations, sometimes for months. The Supreme Court's intervention changed the calculus. Judges who might have been inclined to issue stays now faced a clear directive from the nation's highest court: the executive branch holds the power here, not district judges acting on policy preferences.
The downstream effect has been swift. In early August, even Biden-appointed judges on the First Circuit sided with the administration, reversing lower court orders that had blocked TPS terminations. That development signaled how thoroughly the Supreme Court ruling reshaped the legal landscape, when judges appointed by the prior administration start ruling against their own ideological camp, the legal argument is settled.
The numbers tell the story of how far TPS had expanded before the Trump administration began rolling it back. Across all affected countries, more than one million migrants held TPS protections. The largest groups include approximately 618,000 Venezuelans and roughly 350,000 Haitians. Hondurans account for about 72,000, Nepalis approximately 13,000, and Afghans around 12,000. Thousands more from Syria, Yemen, Cameroon, Nicaragua, and other nations round out the total.
With Burma and South Sudan now cleared, only two countries remain under active court protection: Ethiopia and Somalia. The administration has not publicly detailed its timeline for challenging those remaining orders, but the pattern is clear. Every legal challenge DHS has brought since the Supreme Court's June ruling has succeeded.
The broader immigration enforcement push extends well beyond TPS. The Supreme Court ruled separately in June that migrants standing in Mexico have not legally "arrived" in the United States, another decision that strengthened the administration's hand on border policy and narrowed the legal avenues available to those seeking to enter or remain in the country.
For the roughly 3,700 Burmese nationals whose protections ended Friday, the immediate question is practical: what happens next? The material does not specify when removal proceedings will begin or how many affected migrants have already left the country. Those operational details remain unclear.
TPS, Temporary Protected Status, was created by Congress in 1990 as a narrow humanitarian tool. The idea was straightforward: if a foreign country suffered a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other extraordinary crisis, nationals from that country who were already in the United States could receive a temporary shield from deportation and a work permit. The key word was always "temporary."
In practice, "temporary" became indefinite. Administrations of both parties renewed designations year after year, sometimes for decades. Entire populations built lives, had children, and established roots under a legal status that was never designed to support permanent settlement. The result was a system that functioned as a de facto amnesty program without ever being debated or voted on as one.
The Trump administration's position, that DHS has the authority to end designations when conditions change, is not a radical legal theory. It is what the statute says. What changed is that this administration is the first to enforce it systematically, and the courts, after years of blocking those efforts, have now largely agreed.
The broader pattern of courts siding with immigration enforcement reflects a judiciary that is catching up to what voters demanded: a government that enforces the laws already on the books rather than inventing new ways to avoid them.
Ethiopia and Somalia are the last two holdouts. If the administration's winning streak holds, TPS as a vehicle for indefinite residency will be functionally finished, and a program Congress designed to be temporary will finally live up to its name.