A Clinton-appointed federal judge has cleared the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for South Sudanese nationals, rejecting immigrant-rights advocates' last-ditch legal argument as "self-contradictory" and "self-defeating."
U.S. District Judge Patti Saris, sitting in Boston, issued a 15-page order Friday that dismantled the challengers' renewed bid to preserve South Sudan's TPS designation. Saris had previously blocked the Department of Homeland Security from ending the protections. Now she has reversed course, lifting her own order and handing the administration a clean path forward unless a higher court intervenes.
The ruling affects more than 232 South Sudanese TPS beneficiaries and at least 73 people with pending applications, the Washington Examiner reported. DHS moved on November 6 to terminate South Sudan's TPS designation, stating the country no longer met the statutory conditions for the program, a program Congress created in 1990 to shield foreign nationals from deportation when conditions in their home countries, such as armed conflict or natural disasters, make return unsafe.
After the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 conservative-majority ruling in June allowing the administration to end similar protections for people from Haiti and Syria, the South Sudan challengers, a group of South Sudanese nationals and the nonprofit African Communities Together, returned to court with a new argument. They contended the Supreme Court's decision did not apply to them because, they claimed, TPS authority still rested with the attorney general under the original 1990 law, not with DHS.
Saris was not persuaded. She concluded that Congress transferred TPS authority to DHS when the department was created in 2002. The challengers' argument, she wrote, rested on a "self-contradictory, self-defeating foundation." If DHS lacked the authority to terminate TPS, it also lacked the authority to designate South Sudan for the program in the first place.
As Saris put it in her order:
"South Sudan's original TPS designation would thus be invalid by the same token as its termination."
In other words, the challengers' theory would have destroyed the very protections they were trying to save. That is not a legal strategy, it is a contradiction dressed up as one.
The Supreme Court's June decision had already curtailed lower courts' ability to prevent DHS from terminating TPS designations. Saris's ruling now extends that principle to South Sudan, removing one more judicial roadblock from the administration's path.
DHS General Counsel James Percival celebrated the decision on X shortly after it was released. In one post, he framed the ruling as a victory for the voters who elected the administration:
"Judge Patti Saris just lifted her order preventing us from terminating TPS for South Sudan. Every day these 'administrative stays' are in effect is a day the American people are denied what they voted for."
In a second post, Percival shared a chart listing the current status of TPS terminations across multiple countries. Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Venezuela, and now South Sudan all appeared as terminations "in effect."
Three countries remain in legal limbo. Federal judges continue to block TPS terminations for Ethiopia (Judge Brian Murphy), Somalia (Judge Allison Burroughs), and Burma (Judge Matthew Kennelly), according to Percival's chart. Those cases represent the administration's remaining judicial obstacles on TPS.
The pattern across these cases has been consistent. Lower courts initially blocked the administration's TPS terminations, only to see those blocks overturned or abandoned as higher courts sided with DHS. A First Circuit ruling backing Trump on TPS terminations set the stage, and individual district judges have followed.
Saris is not the first judge to reverse her own position on TPS. In the Haiti case, a federal judge conceded her injunction blocking Trump's TPS termination was dead after the Supreme Court's June ruling stripped the legal foundation from under it. That concession mirrored what Saris did Friday, acknowledging that the law, as the higher courts have now interpreted it, gives DHS the authority the challengers denied it had.
What makes Saris's ruling especially pointed is that she is a Clinton appointee. This was not a Trump-nominated judge rubber-stamping the administration's position. Saris examined the challengers' statutory argument on the merits and found it self-defeating on its own terms. The legal creativity of the immigrant-rights bar ran headlong into the plain structure of federal law, and the law won.
The broader picture is hard to miss. The administration has now secured TPS terminations for nine countries. Three remain blocked. DHS General Counsel Percival is keeping a public scorecard.
Whether the South Sudan challengers will appeal remains unclear. So does the question of whether the three remaining judicial blocks, for Ethiopia, Somalia, and Burma, will hold up as the Supreme Court's June precedent continues to ripple through the lower courts. The administration has won repeatedly on this issue at every level, and the trend line favors DHS.
When a Clinton-appointed judge calls your legal argument "self-contradictory" and "self-defeating," the courts are not where your fight lives anymore. Congress is, and that is where advocates who disagree with TPS terminations should have been making their case all along.