A federal judge in Boston cleared the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than 5,000 Ethiopians, removing the final judicial obstacle to DHS ending TPS designations across all 13 targeted countries.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy on Tuesday dismissed the remaining statutory claims brought by Ethiopian nationals and the advocacy group African Communities Together, ruling that DHS has the authority to end the deportation protections the Biden administration first extended in 2022. The decision means every TPS termination the Trump administration has pursued is now legally in effect, a clean sweep that caps months of courtroom battles stretching from Boston to the Supreme Court.
DHS General Counsel James Percival wasted no time. Within hours of the ruling, Percival posted on social media:
"Judge Brian Murphy just lifted the stay of Ethiopia TPS termination. All TPS terminations are in effect!"
The department itself followed with a blunter warning. DHS posted on X:
"ALL TPS terminations are now IN EFFECT. Those with terminated TPS should leave NOW. If they don't, we will DEPORT them."
The ruling marked a sharp reversal for Murphy himself. Back in April, the judge had blocked DHS's termination of Ethiopian TPS, finding that the agency had "disregarded statutory procedures" and offered a "pretextual" rationale for stripping the protections. At the time, Ethiopian plaintiffs argued, and Murphy agreed, that DHS had not followed the law.
Then the Supreme Court intervened. In June, the Court's 6-3 conservative majority ruled that the administration could end TPS protections for thousands of Haitians and Syrians, and it curtailed the ability of lower-court judges to second-guess DHS decisions to revoke TPS designations. That ruling, as the Supreme Court's decision on Haitian TPS made clear, reshaped the legal landscape overnight.
Murphy initially kept a temporary hold in place on the Ethiopian case even after the Supreme Court ruling, giving both sides time to brief remaining arguments the justices had not directly addressed. But judges handling parallel TPS cases for nationals from South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia rejected those same arguments in recent days, leaving Murphy little room to stand apart.
On Tuesday, he fell in line. Murphy dismissed the plaintiffs' statutory claim that only the attorney general, not DHS, holds the power to extend or terminate TPS under the 1990 law that created the program. The plaintiffs had argued that because the statute predates the creation of DHS after September 11, 2001, authority over TPS never transferred to the newer agency. Murphy rejected that reading, consistent with how other federal judges ruled in the South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia cases.
Murphy did not dismiss the case entirely. He allowed the plaintiffs to continue litigating a Fifth Amendment claim alleging that the administration's decision to end Ethiopian TPS was motivated by racial or national-origin animus. That constitutional argument remains live.
But the practical effect is limited. The injunction blocking DHS from acting is gone. Ethiopian nationals who held TPS, authorization to live and work in the United States, now face the same choice DHS laid out: leave voluntarily, or face removal proceedings. The surviving animus claim may produce a future ruling, but it does not restore the protections in the meantime.
The Biden administration first granted Ethiopians TPS beginning in 2022, citing armed conflict and humanitarian suffering inside the country. DHS under then-Secretary Kristi Noem announced in December that it would end those protections, stating that conditions in Ethiopia no longer posed a serious threat to nationals returning safely. The plaintiffs disputed that assessment and accused the administration of using a pretextual justification to strip protections from a predominantly Black immigrant population.
That dispute now continues under the narrow Fifth Amendment track Murphy preserved. Whether it produces any meaningful relief for Ethiopian TPS holders remains an open question, one that will play out long after DHS has begun enforcement.
The pattern that led to Tuesday's outcome has repeated across multiple countries. Biden-appointed judges initially blocked TPS terminations, only to see higher courts or the Supreme Court itself strip those blocks away. Murphy, himself a Biden appointee, followed the same arc, blocking first, then yielding after the Supreme Court narrowed the legal ground beneath him.
Tuesday's ruling carries significance beyond the 5,000-plus Ethiopians directly affected. Ethiopia was the final holdout. The Supreme Court's June decision had already cleared TPS terminations for Haiti and Syria, and federal judges subsequently conceded that the legal basis for blocking other terminations had collapsed.
With Murphy's order, DHS can now enforce terminations across all 13 countries it targeted. The administration had argued throughout the litigation that TPS was never intended as a permanent immigration status, that the word "temporary" means something, and that conditions in designated countries should be reassessed periodically rather than rolled forward indefinitely.
Critics of the terminations, including African Communities Together, maintained that sending people back to countries still experiencing instability amounts to a policy choice driven by hostility rather than honest assessment. Murphy's decision to keep the animus claim alive suggests he found at least enough in the record to let that argument proceed to discovery or trial.
But the broader trajectory is unmistakable. The Supreme Court gave the executive branch wide latitude to end TPS designations, and lower courts, including judges who had previously defied that direction, have now complied. The legal infrastructure that immigration advocates built to preserve TPS through the courts has been dismantled, case by case, country by country.
Newsmax reported that Murphy's Tuesday ruling dismissed both the statutory claims and other unspecified grounds the plaintiffs had raised, leaving only the constitutional animus theory standing. The ruling did not include a stay or any mechanism to delay DHS enforcement while the remaining claim is litigated.
For the more than 5,000 Ethiopian nationals who relied on TPS to work and live in the United States legally, the ruling converts a temporary protection into a deadline. DHS has made its position plain. The courts, from Boston to the Supreme Court, have stepped aside.
When a program called "temporary" lasts only as long as the law intended, that is not a crisis, it is the system working the way it was designed.