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Trump Wins Court Fight Over Somalia TPS—But the Ruling Does Not End the Legal Battle
The Trump administration has won another important court victory in its effort to unwind Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from several countries.
This time, the immediate consequences fall on nearly 1,100 Somali nationals in the United States.
A federal judge in Massachusetts lifted a temporary order that had prevented the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Somalia’s Temporary Protected Status designation.
The decision removed the legal protection that had temporarily preserved TPS while a lawsuit challenging the administration’s action moved forward.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services now lists Somalia’s TPS designation as terminated effective August 14, 2026.
That makes the ruling a significant victory for President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
But it does not mean every legal argument surrounding the termination has been definitively resolved.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs came after the Supreme Court dramatically narrowed the path available to challengers seeking to use federal courts to stop TPS terminations.
And understanding exactly what the Supreme Court decided is central to understanding what happened to Somalia’s protections.
Temporary Protected Status is a humanitarian immigration program created by Congress.
It allows the secretary of Homeland Security to designate countries whose nationals cannot safely return because of armed conflict, environmental disasters or other extraordinary and temporary conditions.
Eligible beneficiaries may remain in the United States, receive employment authorization and receive protection from removal while the designation remains in effect.
Somalia has been part of the program for more than three decades.
It was initially designated for TPS on September 16, 1991, amid conflict and instability following the collapse of the Somali government.
The designation was repeatedly extended and, at various points, redesignated under both ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary-and-temporary-conditions grounds.
That long history changed in January.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Somalia’s TPS designation would be terminated.
The Federal Register notice was published January 14 and originally set the termination to take effect at 11:59 p.m. on March 17, 2026.
DHS said that, after reviewing country conditions and consulting other government agencies, the secretary had determined that Somalia no longer met the statutory requirements for TPS.
The administration also concluded that allowing the designation to continue was contrary to the national interest.
That assessment immediately became controversial.
Somalia continues to experience violence involving government forces and the militant group al-Shabaab.
The State Department also continues to maintain its highest-level travel warning for Somalia, advising Americans not to travel there because of threats including terrorism, kidnapping, crime and unrest.
Those conditions became part of the broader dispute over whether the administration was justified in concluding that Somalia no longer qualified for TPS.
But the lawsuit that followed raised another issue.
The plaintiffs argued that the termination was not simply a disagreement over conditions inside Somalia.
They alleged that the decision was influenced by unconstitutional discrimination against Somali and other non-white immigrants.
On March 9, four Somali nationals joined African Communities Together and the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans in filing suit in federal court in Massachusetts.
They argued that the administration’s decision was procedurally flawed and driven by a discriminatory and predetermined policy rather than an objective assessment of country conditions.
They also pointed to Trump’s previous public statements about Somali immigrants.
Those remarks became evidence in the plaintiffs’ argument that discriminatory intent may have played a role in terminating the designation.
The administration disputed that characterization.
Four days after the lawsuit was filed, Burroughs temporarily stopped the termination from taking effect.
Her March 13 order postponed the March 17 deadline and kept TPS protections in place while the court considered the challenge.
The judge emphasized the consequences beneficiaries could face if the termination took effect before the legal dispute could be properly considered.
The plaintiffs said more than 1,000 people could face detention, removal, family separation and potential physical danger if returned to Somalia.
For several months, that order prevented DHS from carrying out the termination.
Then the Supreme Court changed the legal landscape.
On June 25, the Court decided Mullin v. Doe, together with a related Haiti case involving Trump v. Miot.
The cases concerned attempts to stop the Trump administration from terminating TPS for Syria and Haiti.
The Supreme Court held that the challengers were not entitled to orders postponing those terminations while litigation continued.
The decision turned largely on language Congress placed directly into the TPS statute.
Under 8 U.S.C. §1254a(b)(5)(A), there is no judicial review of a determination by the Homeland Security secretary concerning the designation, extension or termination of a foreign country’s TPS designation.
The Supreme Court concluded that this provision barred the challengers’ nonconstitutional claims attacking the secretary’s decision-making process.
That was a major victory for the administration.
But the constitutional part of the ruling requires more precision.
The Court did not simply announce that every constitutional challenge to a TPS termination is categorically barred from federal court.
Instead, when addressing the Haitian plaintiffs’ equal-protection claim, the Court concluded that the claim was unlikely to succeed on its merits for purposes of obtaining interim relief.
The majority considered statements attributed to Trump and Noem but determined that the evidence presented was insufficient to establish that Haiti’s TPS designation had been terminated because of the racial composition of Haiti’s population.
Three justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented.
That 6–3 outcome had consequences far beyond Haiti and Syria.
The statutory language interpreted by the Supreme Court applies to TPS decisions generally.
That meant plaintiffs challenging terminations for other countries suddenly faced a much more difficult path.
Somalia was one of them.
After the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump administration pressed the Massachusetts court to remove the protection keeping Somali TPS alive.
The litigation continued as Burroughs considered whether the Somali plaintiffs had arguments that survived the Supreme Court’s decision.
An appeal also reached the First Circuit.
On August 3, the appeals court dismissed the government’s appeal and directed the matter back toward the district court so Burroughs could act on the pending dispute over the stay.
The result came less than two weeks later.
Burroughs lifted the temporary protection on August 14.
According to reporting on the decision, the judge concluded that the plaintiffs had made a convincing showing that they could suffer irreparable harm if TPS ended.
But that was not enough.
They also needed to demonstrate a sufficient likelihood of succeeding on the merits of their legal claims.
Following the Supreme Court’s June decision, Burroughs concluded that they had not done so.
That distinction explains why the outcome can appear unusual.
A judge can conclude that ending a policy may cause serious harm and still decline to block the government from implementing it.
Emergency injunctions and stays require more than a showing of potential injury.
The plaintiffs also have to satisfy legal standards concerning the strength of their underlying case.
After Mullin v. Doe, that became significantly harder for TPS challengers.
The practical consequences for Somali beneficiaries were immediate.
Once Burroughs lifted the stay, DHS was no longer prevented by that order from implementing its January termination decision.
USCIS subsequently updated its guidance to state that Somalia’s TPS designation was terminated effective August 14.
That means beneficiaries can no longer rely on Somalia’s TPS designation itself for protection from removal or employment authorization.
The consequences for individual beneficiaries can still differ depending on whether a person has another valid immigration status, another form of relief or a separate legal basis for remaining in the country.
Ending TPS does not by itself establish that every former beneficiary will immediately be deported.
But it removes the protection that TPS provided.
For the Trump administration, the decision fits into a much broader effort.
DHS has moved to terminate TPS designations covering nationals of numerous countries.
The June Supreme Court decision allowed the administration to proceed with the terminations involving Haiti and Syria.
Judges have also allowed TPS terminations involving South Sudan and Myanmar to move forward.
As of the August 14 Somalia ruling, Reuters reported that Ethiopia remained the TPS termination still blocked by a court among those cases.
That broader pattern is why the Somalia decision matters beyond roughly 1,100 people directly affected by it.
The Supreme Court has substantially limited one of the most important legal tools challengers were using to stop TPS terminations before they took effect.
Congress gave the executive branch considerable discretion over TPS.
It also expressly restricted judicial review of decisions concerning whether a country should receive, retain or lose a designation.
The Supreme Court’s June ruling gave that restriction significant force.
Supporters of the administration can point to that statutory structure and argue that Congress deliberately assigned these decisions to the executive branch.
From that perspective, courts should not substitute their own assessment of country conditions for the judgment assigned by law to the secretary of Homeland Security.
Critics see a different danger.
If judicial review is extremely limited, they argue, it becomes more difficult to challenge a termination even when beneficiaries claim the government ignored required procedures or allowed improper considerations to affect its decision.
The constitutional question therefore remains particularly important.
The Supreme Court rejected the discrimination theory presented in the Haiti case at the interim-relief stage because the challengers were unlikely to prove that race motivated the termination.
But the Court’s treatment of that claim was not equivalent to holding that every possible constitutional challenge involving TPS can never be heard.
That is an important limitation on how broadly the June ruling should be described.
The Somalia case also highlights another distinction.
Whether Somalia remains dangerous is not exactly the same legal question as whether the federal courts can overturn DHS’s determination that the country no longer satisfies the statutory requirements for TPS.
The Federal Register notice acknowledges the history of armed conflict and instability while recording the secretary’s determination that the conditions required for continued designation were no longer present.
The plaintiffs strongly disagree with that assessment.
But after Mullin, simply arguing that DHS reached the wrong conclusion about country conditions faces a major jurisdictional obstacle.
That is why Burroughs’ August decision represents a substantial victory for Trump.
The administration did not merely win a factual argument over whether Somalia is safe.
It benefited from a Supreme Court interpretation that sharply limits the ability of lower courts to review the type of TPS decision DHS made.
At the same time, lifting the stay is not the same as a final judicial declaration validating every factual allegation, every statement by administration officials or every legal theory surrounding the termination.
The underlying lawsuit has not transformed into a ruling that discrimination never occurred.
Nor has the court declared Somalia free of serious security problems.
What changed most directly is the plaintiffs’ ability to keep the termination frozen while their challenge continues.
For nearly five months, the March stay prevented the administration’s decision from taking effect.
That protection is now gone.
And unlike immediately after the judge’s ruling, there is no longer any ambiguity about DHS’s operational position.
USCIS says Somalia’s TPS designation terminated on August 14, 2026.
So the administration has unquestionably secured an important court victory.
The more precise conclusion, however, is narrower than simply saying the courts approved every aspect of Trump’s TPS policy.
The Supreme Court ruled that the statutory challenges in the Haiti and Syria cases were barred from judicial review and that the equal-protection claim before it was unlikely to succeed.
That ruling then severely weakened the legal foundation for continuing to block Somalia’s termination.
Burroughs responded by lifting her stay.
DHS responded by putting the termination into effect.
For the nearly 1,100 Somali nationals affected, that procedural distinction has a very real consequence.
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Their TPS protection has ended.
What remains unresolved is how much room, if any, future plaintiffs will have to challenge TPS terminations on constitutional grounds that differ from—or are supported by stronger evidence than—the claim the Supreme Court rejected in Mullin v. Doe.
