A federal judge in Boston has officially cleared the path for President Donald Trump’s administration to eliminate the humanitarian legal protections that have permitted more than 5,000 Ethiopian nationals to safely live and maintain employment within the United States. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a decisive ruling dissolving the last remaining judicial injunction that had kept the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Ethiopia.
This legal development arrives in the wake of a crucial U.S. Supreme Court decision delivered earlier in the year. Powered by its 6-3 conservative majority, that higher court ruling severely curtailed the judicial branch’s authority to review DHS initiatives aimed at terminating TPS designations across thirteen different countries. Following the Boston ruling, DHS General Counsel James Percival took to social media to celebrate the development, boldly declaring, “All TPS terminations are in effect!”.
Under existing federal guidelines, Temporary Protected Status is extended to foreign nationals who find themselves unable to return safely to their home countries due to ongoing armed conflicts, devastating natural disasters, or other extraordinary and temporary emergencies. The designation is vital because it grants eligible migrants essential work authorization along with temporary safety from deportation.
The administration of former Democratic President Joe Biden initially granted TPS to qualifying Ethiopian citizens already residing in the United States back in 2022. That decision was anchored in the urgent need to protect individuals from widespread armed conflict and profound humanitarian suffering in East Africa. Nonetheless, under the current Trump administration, the DHS announced its intention to phase out these protections, maintaining that conditions in the region had stabilized enough to warrant safe repatriation.
The path to this ruling involved substantial legal friction. Earlier in the proceedings, Judge Murphy had initially blocked the DHS’s termination plans, asserting that the administration’s rationale was merely pretextual and failed to follow statutory requirements. However, bound by the Supreme Court’s subsequent precedent regarding similar terminations for nationals from Haiti and Syria, Judge Murphy was forced to re-evaluate remaining arguments.
Among these was the plaintiffs’ claim that the 1990 statute creating TPS vested termination authority strictly in the attorney general rather than the DHS, an agency established later. Murphy ultimately rejected this statutory argument, mirroring similar rejections by judges handling parallel cases for migrants from South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia.
Despite dismissing several of the plaintiffs’ claims, Judge Murphy carved out one significant exception. He ruled that the plaintiffs—which include individual Ethiopian nationals alongside the advocacy organization African Communities Together—may proceed with litigating whether the DHS’s termination decision violates the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The legal team contends that the administration’s actions were driven by unlawful racial and national origin animus, forming part of a broader pattern to strip away protections primarily affecting non-white and non-European communities.
