President Donald Trump scored a big victory Friday after an Obama-appointed judge cleared the way for immigration officials to end temporary legal protections for thousands of Somali nationals living in the United States.
Boston U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, who previously had issued a stay stopping the administration from terminating Somalia’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS), ended her previous action, saying she had to defer to the Supreme Court that in June sharply limited the ability of federal judges to override certain executive branch policies.
The decision, Fox News reported, allows the Trump administration to move forward with ending Somalian nationals TPS protection, potentially allowing deportation of thousands of affected migrants who lack another lawful basis to remain in the U.S.
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TPS, which was created by Congress in 1990, gives critical protection to people who come to America from countries plagued with armed conflict and natural disasters because their return would be unsafe. They are also allowed to work in the U.S.
In January that administration announced it planned to terminate Somalia’s TPS designation, with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying the country’s conditions had improved enough to end the humanitarian protections.
A federal lawsuit brought by four Somali nationals and two advocacy groups challenged that decision and Judge Burroughs had responded with a stay.
However, the Supreme Court ruled in June in Mullin v. Doe that the TPS statute in fact prevents judicial review of certain non-constitutional decisions by the administration, such as terminating TPS designations.
In short, “the ruling curtailed lower courts’ ability to review Trump administration efforts to terminate TPS designations for nationals of multiple countries,” Fox News reported Saturday.
Burroughs wrote that she was “bound … to view things through the Mullin prism,” according to the cable news outlet’s coverage.
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The decision allows the Trump administration to move forward with ending TPS for Somalia, potentially exposing affected migrants who lack another lawful basis to remain in the U.S. to deportation.
Plaintiffs in the Somalia case had argued that the administration’s decision was caused by bias against non-white immigrants, citing Trump’s previous descriptions of Somalis as “garbage” and “low IQ people.”
Judge Burroughs wrote that the plaintiffs had made a “convincing showing” that they would suffer “irreparable harm” if the TPS status was removed. Despite those findings, the judge cited the Supreme Court’s ruling and lifted the stay.
Sources at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told Fox News Digital previously that 2,471 Somali nationals in the U.S. currently have TPS, while another 1,383 have applied for that status.
Somalia is just one of three other African countries where the Trump administration has ended TPS status, the others being Cameroon, Ethiopia, and South Sudan.
The addition of the four countries makes a total of 13 countries that were affected by the latest wave of TPS terminations, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Myanmar, Business Insider reported Sunday.
“The latest move is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to unwind TPS designations that have protected hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from deportation,” that outlet reported.
Breitbart News contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.