President Donald Trump scored a major legal victory Friday after a federal judge cleared the way for his administration to terminate temporary legal protections for thousands of Somali nationals living in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston lifted a stay that had prevented the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Somalia's Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, citing a June Supreme Court ruling that sharply limited judicial review of similar administration actions.
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.
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Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, had previously blocked the termination from taking effect in a lawsuit brought by four Somali nationals and two advocacy groups, including African Communities Together.
The Trump administration announced in January that it planned to terminate Somalia's TPS designation, with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arguing that conditions in the country had improved enough to end the humanitarian protections.
The Supreme Court ruled in June in Mullin v. Doe that the TPS statute bars judicial review of certain non-constitutional decisions by the administration to terminate TPS designations. The court also found that the plaintiffs' equal protection challenge in that case was unlikely to succeed.
The ruling curtailed lower courts' ability to review Trump administration efforts to terminate TPS designations for nationals of multiple countries.
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Plaintiffs challenging the termination of Somalia's designation argued that the administration's decision was motivated by bias against non-White immigrants, pointing to Trump's previous descriptions of Somalis as "garbage" and "low IQ people."
Following the Supreme Court's ruling, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint raising new constitutional claims and sought emergency relief in another effort to prevent Somalia's TPS protections from ending.
Burroughs issued an administrative stay earlier this month after African Communities Together and other plaintiffs alleged that the administration violated the Fifth Amendment by terminating Somalia's TPS designation based on racial and national-origin discrimination.
In Friday's ruling, Burroughs said the plaintiffs had presented a compelling case but concluded that the Supreme Court's decision constrained her ability to continue blocking the administration's action.
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Burroughs wrote that she was "bound … to view things through the Mullin prism," referring to the Supreme Court case.
"Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is withheld … and the balance of hardships and the public interest also favor Plaintiffs, given that the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden," she wrote.
Despite those findings, Burroughs lifted the stay, allowing the administration's termination of Somalia's TPS designation to move forward.
The Trump administration's decision affects several thousand Somali nationals currently living in the United States.
Sources at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services previously told Fox News Digital that 2,471 Somali nationals in the U.S. currently have TPS, while another 1,383 have pending TPS applications.
Fox News Digital's Preston Mizell and Elaine Mallon, along with Reuters, contributed to this report.