Judge Lifts TPS Block: 1,100 Somalis Face Deportation Risk

For immigration practitioners and legal operations teams, the Boston ruling is the controlling case to add to TPS termination dashboards: it shows how the Supreme Court's June 2026 decision is being applied to foreclose bias and country-conditions challenges. The path from Kristi Noem's January announcement to Judge Burroughs's March injunction and now the August lift provides a clear litigation timeline for client advisories. Counsel should update case strategy and docket tracking as DHS begins Somalia TPS wind-down procedures.

On August 14, 2026, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts lifted the injunction that had blocked the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalia, clearing the way for nearly 1,100 Somali nationals to lose work authorization and protection from removal. The ruling in Boston is the latest in a rapid sequence of post-Supreme Court decisions that has all but dismantled judicial barriers to the administration's effort to terminate TPS designations for 13 countries.

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She had previously blocked then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's January 2026 announcement that Somalia's conditions had improved enough to justify ending the designation, despite ongoing hostilities involving al-Shabaab.

Burroughs's order came roughly two months after the U.S. Supreme Court's June 2026 decision, in which the 6-3 conservative majority curtailed lower-court review of Department of Homeland Security decisions to end TPS. The high court allowed the administration to proceed with terminations for Haiti and Syria, affecting thousands of additional people. That ruling, concerning the Secretary's largely unreviewable discretion under immigration law, became the controlling precedent for Burroughs to revisit her March 2026 injunction. She had previously blocked then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's January 2026 announcement that Somalia's conditions had improved enough to justify ending the designation, despite ongoing hostilities involving al-Shabaab.

Procedurally, Burroughs initially continued the temporary block after the Supreme Court ruled while she considered whether plaintiffs could raise alternative challenges that the Supreme Court decision did not address. The plaintiffs—four Somalis and two advocacy groups including African Communities Together—argued the administration acted with bias against non-white immigrants, citing Trump's past statements describing Somalis as 'garbage' and 'low IQ people.' But by August 14, Burroughs had concluded the litigation could not proceed on those grounds, effectively resolving the case in the government's favor.

The implications are substantial for the affected community. TPS recipients have legal work authorization, protection from deportation, and often long-standing U.S. ties. Ending the designation starts a regulatory process that, absent further judicial intervention, will expose nearly 1,100 Somalis to removal proceedings. More broadly, the TPS landscape is now governed by the Supreme Court's ruling: two other judges last week allowed the administration to end TPS for South Sudan and Myanmar, and only Ethiopia remains blocked by a judge. The cascading rulings demonstrate that after the high court's June decision, lower courts are largely treating DHS TPS terminations as unreviewable, regardless of disagreement with the policy or the factual assessment of country conditions.