WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has won court approval to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for migrants from South Sudan and Myanmar, expanding a broad effort to dismantle humanitarian protections that have allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live and work legally in the United States.
Two federal judges on Friday rejected last-ditch challenges by immigrant-rights advocates seeking to preserve TPS for the two countries. The rulings followed a June U.S. Supreme Court decision that sharply limited the ability of lower courts to block the administration’s termination of TPS designations.
TPS is a federal program created in 1990 that permits eligible nationals of countries facing armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions to remain in the United States and obtain work authorization temporarily. The designations can remain in place for years and, in some cases, decades.
The South Sudan designation, first granted in 2011, covers about 232 people, while the Myanmar designation applies to roughly 4,000, according to court proceedings cited by Reuters. Federal judges in Boston and Chicago had previously blocked the terminations, but the latest rulings cleared the way for the Department of Homeland Security to proceed. DHS General Counsel James Percival welcomed the decisions and said the only TPS terminations still blocked by court orders were those involving Ethiopia and Somalia.
The decisions are part of a wider administration campaign to reduce the use of TPS. The administration has moved to terminate protections for migrants from numerous countries, including Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Yemen. The Supreme Court's June ruling specifically concerned challenges involving Haitian and Syrian TPS holders and held that lower courts could not postpone the terminations through the statutory mechanism used in those cases.
The Haiti case has been particularly consequential because more than 350,000 Haitians had been covered by TPS. A federal judge in Washington initially blocked the administration’s effort to terminate those protections in February, but reversed that position on Wednesday after the Supreme Court ruling removed the legal basis for the earlier injunction.
Immigrant-rights groups have argued that ending TPS could expose people to deportation and return to countries experiencing serious instability. The administration has maintained that TPS is intended to be temporary and that conditions in some countries no longer justify continued protection.
With the latest court decisions, the administration can proceed with ending TPS for South Sudanese and Myanmar nationals, while litigation over other designations continues. Ethiopia and Somalia remain subject to court orders preventing their terminations.
