A federal judge in Massachusetts issued a new order preserving Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopian nationals less than a month after the Supreme Court ruled 6, 3 that lower courts lack authority to second-guess those very decisions, and it is the same judge who previously clashed with ICE over a diverted deportation flight.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, appointed by President Biden, granted an administrative stay Friday in African Communities Together v. Mullin, temporarily blocking the Trump administration from ending TPS protections for an estimated 26,700 Ethiopian nationals living in the United States. The order came just hours after a second Massachusetts judge, Senior U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, issued her own stay halting TPS termination for South Sudan nationals in a separate case brought by the same plaintiff organization, Fox News Digital reported.
Both orders landed fewer than four weeks after the Supreme Court's June 25 decision in Mullin v. Doe, which held that federal courts generally cannot hear Administrative Procedure Act challenges to DHS decisions designating or terminating TPS. The high court left one narrow door open: whether constitutional claims might still proceed. Murphy and Saris each walked straight through it.
Murphy is no stranger to conflict with the administration on immigration enforcement. The Supreme Court has twice sided with the Trump administration against his orders restricting deportations of illegal immigrants to countries other than their homelands. Earlier this year, before the June ruling, Murphy sided with challengers and postponed DHS's termination of Ethiopia's TPS designation, finding that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on claims that the agency failed to follow congressionally established procedures.
DHS General Counsel James Percival did not hold back after Friday's order. Percival posted on X accusing Murphy of "mutiny" against the Supreme Court and reviving a separate grievance from May 2025, when Murphy halted a deportation flight bound for South Sudan.
Percival wrote:
"Remember when that district judge rerouted a plane with child rapists headed for South Sudan? The judge made ICE land in Djibouti to face Malaria and terrorist rocket attacks from Yemen. Fun fact: it was the very same Judge Brian Murphy who entered a lawless TPS order today!"
DHS has claimed that Murphy's May 2025 order stranded ICE officers at a U.S. military base in Djibouti, where they faced malaria exposure and the threat of rocket attacks from terrorist groups operating in neighboring Yemen. The characterization of the deportees as "child rapists" and the order as "lawless" are Percival's own descriptions; neither claim is independently verified in available reporting.
Saris, for her part, framed her stay more narrowly. She said the order was "not a ruling on the merits" and was "simply meant to temporarily maintain the status quo while the court considers the case." Her stay preserves TPS protections for South Sudan nationals while the court weighs whether plaintiffs may amend their lawsuit in light of the Supreme Court's June decision.
Murphy's order follows the same logic. After the Supreme Court closed the APA pathway, the plaintiffs in African Communities Together v. Mullin revised their complaint to press constitutional claims instead. Murphy's stay keeps TPS protections in place while he considers whether those claims can go forward, a question the Supreme Court's majority opinion deliberately left unresolved.
The pattern is now familiar. The administration wins a clear ruling from the nation's highest court, and lower-court judges find a procedural side door to keep the old protections alive. The Supreme Court's authority to end Haitian TPS protections produced a similar cycle of lower-court resistance earlier this year.
The Biden administration first granted Ethiopians TPS in 2022, with protections taking effect December 12 of that year. Then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pointed to ongoing armed conflict, widespread violence, human rights abuses, and food insecurity as justification. The designation was later extended through December 12, 2025.
In December 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem determined that conditions in Ethiopia no longer justified the protections. She announced a 60-day wind-down period, with TPS set to expire on February 13, 2026. Murphy intervened before that deadline arrived.
The Trump administration has moved to terminate TPS designations for 13 of the 17 countries that held protections under Biden, affecting more than one million migrants, AP News reported. Murphy's earlier ruling on the Ethiopia case found that DHS had "disregarded the statutory procedures Congress enacted" and offered a "pretextual" rationale for ending TPS, according to Breitbart.
In that earlier ruling, Murphy wrote that "the will of the President does not supersede that of Congress" and that "presidential whims do not and cannot supplant agencies' statutory obligations." The Supreme Court's 6, 3 decision in Mullin v. Doe effectively rejected the legal framework Murphy relied on, stripping courts of APA jurisdiction over TPS determinations. DOJ attorneys had argued in their Supreme Court brief that "Congress forbade federal courts to second-guess TPS determinations, no matter whether courts would cavil with the final outcome," the Washington Examiner noted.
The high court agreed. And yet here is Murphy, less than a month later, issuing another stay on the same subject.
The reaction from the right was swift. Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a conservative legal organization, posted on X:
"These Democrat operatives in robes do not have the power to do this. The Supreme Court just made that crystal clear. So it's time to ignore these clearly lawless orders."
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter struck a similar note:
"These puny little district court judges have been overruled so many times by the supreme court, especially on immigration, I think it's time for the president to take his constitutional oath seriously, and ignore them."
Both Davis and Coulter are urging the administration to treat the lower-court stays as unenforceable in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling. That would be an extraordinary step, one with no recent precedent, but the frustration reflects a broader pattern. District judges, many appointed by Democratic presidents, have repeatedly used procedural stays and narrow legal theories to delay or block immigration enforcement actions that the Supreme Court has otherwise endorsed. The Supreme Court's role in checking executive power has become a flashpoint across the political spectrum, but the question now is whether lower courts are checking the Supreme Court itself.
The Supreme Court had previously halted lower-court blocks on ending TPS for Venezuelan nationals twice through its emergency docket. But it has not yet lifted the blocks on Haiti and Syria TPS cases, which were the subject of consolidated oral arguments in Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot on April 29. The 6, 3 ruling that followed was supposed to settle the jurisdictional question.
Fox News Digital reached out to African Communities Together for comment. No response was reported.
TPS, Temporary Protected Status, is a federal designation that shields foreign nationals from deportation when conditions in their home countries, such as armed conflict or natural disaster, make return unsafe. Congress designed it as a short-term measure. Ethiopia's designation has now been in effect since December 2022, more than three and a half years. The Trump administration's position is straightforward: conditions have changed, the designation should end, and the executive branch, not a district judge in Massachusetts, has the statutory authority to make that call.
Murphy's Friday order does not resolve the merits. It preserves the status quo while he decides whether the plaintiffs' new constitutional claims have legs. But the practical effect is the same as every prior stay: the administration's policy is frozen, TPS holders remain protected, and the clock keeps running on a "temporary" program that shows no sign of ending.
The broader tension between congressional authority and executive action on immigration is not going away. Nor is the question of what happens when a single district judge can effectively override a Supreme Court majority.
The Supreme Court spoke clearly on June 25. Two judges in Massachusetts answered just as clearly: they do not intend to listen.