A federal judge lifted a temporary block preventing the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for roughly 1,100 Somalis, ruling that potential immigration enforcement does not itself create a protected liberty interest while emphasizing that removals remain subject to due process protections.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for approximately 1,100 Somali nationals, removing an earlier court-ordered barrier that had temporarily prevented the Department of Homeland Security from ending the protections.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued the ruling after advocacy groups challenged DHS’s decision to withdraw the designation, according to The Epoch Times.
The groups filed suit in March seeking to stop the administration from lifting TPS for Somalis. The litigation resulted in a temporary block while the court considered the challenge.
Friday’s order removes that restriction, allowing DHS to proceed with terminating TPS for the affected group and potentially subjecting former beneficiaries to immigration enforcement.
Burroughs stressed, however, that ending TPS does not eliminate constitutional protections during subsequent enforcement proceedings.
“If the government wishes to remove or detain Somali people who previously held TPS, those enforcement actions will be subject to the protections of the Due Process Clause,” Burroughs wrote.
She added that the possibility of future immigration enforcement does not itself establish a constitutional right to remain free from such action.
“The Court is aware of no precedent that would allow it to find a protected liberty interest in being free from the prospect of immigration enforcement,” she wrote.
The judge also rejected, at this stage of the litigation, a claim that the administration’s decision regarding Somali TPS was unlawfully motivated by racial discrimination.
“Though Plaintiffs lay out a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist … the Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim,” Burroughs wrote.
In reaching that conclusion, she cited Mullin v. Doe, a June 2026 Supreme Court decision that she noted “included a constitutional race-discrimination claim.”
The ruling represents another development in President Donald Trump’s broader effort to reduce the number of immigrants protected under Temporary Protected Status.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to provide temporary protection from removal to nationals of countries experiencing conditions such as armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary circumstances that can make returning unsafe.
Somalia was first designated for TPS in 1991.
The Trump administration has argued that the program has increasingly functioned far beyond its original temporary purpose and has effectively allowed large numbers of foreign nationals to remain in the United States for extended periods.
Since Trump returned to office, ending or limiting TPS designations covering hundreds of thousands of immigrants has become a significant component of the administration’s immigration policy.
The Somali case challenged one of those efforts by arguing that DHS should not be permitted to terminate the designation and that the administration’s actions were legally and constitutionally improper.
Burroughs’ Friday ruling does not eliminate due process requirements for individual Somali nationals who may later face detention or removal proceedings.
Instead, the decision concludes that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated a sufficient legal basis to continue preventing the administration from ending the TPS designation itself.
As a result, approximately 1,100 Somalis who had been protected by the program could now become subject to immigration enforcement once their TPS protections end, depending on their individual immigration circumstances.
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