Donald Trump won a mandate on immigration, and the courts keep pretending otherwise.
The Supreme Court already told lower-court judges they cannot block Temporary Protected Status terminations based on non-constitutional claims. The First Circuit just enforced that ruling by reversing similar stays for Ethiopia and South Sudan.
And now a Barack Obama-appointed federal judge in Massachusetts found a new way to keep the Somalia TPS termination on ice anyway — and the administration is furious about it.
The Judge Who Won’t Take No for an Answer
US District Judge Allison Burroughs, appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued a new administrative stay after a group called African Communities Together and other plaintiffs filed an amended complaint alleging the Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment by terminating Somalia’s Temporary Protected Status designation based on racial and national-origin discrimination.
Burroughs first entered an administrative stay in March preventing the Somalia TPS termination from taking effect, and that stay had been in place for months.
The plaintiffs filed an amended complaint and emergency motion in a renewed bid to keep Somalia’s TPS protections alive after the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Mullin v. Doe. That ruling, decided 6-3, held that federal courts have no power to review any aspect of a TPS termination decision — not the outcome, and not the process used to reach it.
The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed similar administrative stays issued by other district judges who had temporarily delayed TPS terminations for Ethiopia and South Sudan, basing its rulings on the Supreme Court’s Mullin decision.
So when the First Circuit reversed those stays, the legal ground under Burroughs’ original order appeared to collapse. The plaintiffs did not accept that. They responded by filing an amended complaint pivoting to Fifth Amendment claims, and Burroughs granted a new stay.
The order declared the termination “void” while the court decides whether the claims warrant a longer pause.
DHS Calls It What It Is
The administration did not take the ruling quietly.
“Judge Allison Burroughs just entered yet another order preventing the termination of Somalia TPS. There is no serious debate about what is going on in these cases — defiance, obstruction, and delay,” DHS General Counsel James Percival wrote on X.
Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan went further, calling the order legally indefensible from top to bottom. “The district judge has entered a novel ‘administrative stay’ to sort out the claims. She has declared the TPS termination ‘void’ for now, while deciding whether any of the claims can justify a more permanent pause,” Wessan wrote on X.
Wessan argued that the order “turns the law upside down,” writing that four of the lawsuit’s five claims are foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Mullin and describing the remaining claim as “frivolous.”
“Even if this was a fresh lawsuit without the baggage, the claims cannot justify any relief — much less meet the high bar for interim relief,” Wessan wrote. “This is very bad. I hope that, with time to review, Judge Burroughs vacates her administrative stay to allow the correct status quo to continue.”
The plaintiffs’ amended complaint leans on the argument that the entire process was rigged from the start. The lawsuit argues that DHS’s decision to revoke Somalia’s TPS designation was predetermined, pointing to a Trump Truth Social post from November 2025 announcing the end of TPS months before DHS had completed the review process.
The plaintiffs argue that deprived Somali TPS holders of the fair process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause because the decision had effectively already been made before the agency completed the review required by law.
The complaint also alleges the administration violated the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee by targeting Somali nationals based on race and national origin, citing Trump’s past remarks describing Somali immigrants as “criminals,” “gang members” and “low IQ,” as well as his statements that he doesn’t “want them in our country” and to “send them back.”
The plaintiffs contend their amended complaint presents a fundamentally different case than those recently rejected by the First Circuit. Whether the appeals court agrees is the next question — and it may not take long to find out.
What Happens When Courts Become the Opposition Party
There’s a pattern here worth naming plainly. The Supreme Court sets a limit. The First Circuit enforces it against two judges. A third judge immediately finds a new angle to keep the block alive. The administration calls it defiance. And the cycle continues.
TPS was never designed to be permanent. Temporary Protected Status allows eligible people from designated countries to remain in the United States when war, disaster, or other dangerous conditions make a safe return difficult — but it does not provide permanent residence or an automatic path to citizenship. Somalia has been continuously designated for TPS since President George H.W. Bush established the protection in 1991. That’s 35 years of “temporary” protection. At some point, the word loses its meaning entirely.
DHS announced the Somalia termination in January 2026, concluding that Somalia no longer met the legal conditions for TPS, with a formal termination notice setting March 17 as the final day of the designation. DHS estimated that 1,082 people had approved Somalia TPS at the time of the decision.
But the termination never took effect. Courts kept blocking it. And when the Supreme Court narrowed the legal path for those blocks, the plaintiffs simply rewrote their lawsuit around the narrow opening that remained.
The Trump administration has also asked the Supreme Court to lift lower court blocks on ending TPS for Syria and Haiti, with the Solicitor General arguing those cases are “materially similar” and warrant full Supreme Court review. The Somalia case may well end up on the same path.
The Supreme Court has tried to draw lines. The First Circuit has tried to enforce them. And yet here we are, with another Obama-appointed judge declaring a lawfully ordered TPS termination “void” on the basis of claims that Iowa’s own solicitor general calls frivolous.
At some point the question isn’t whether the administration will keep fighting these cases. It will. The question is whether the courts will keep finding new ways to slow-walk an immigration enforcement agenda that the American people voted for, and the Supreme Court approved, how long Congress is willing to watch that happen before it does something about it.
Sources: Fox News, The Post Millennial, American Almanac, Just the News, Liberty One News, Congressional Research Service, Supreme Court of the United States (Mullin v. Doe, No. 25-1083, June 25, 2026)
