A federal appeals court handed the Trump administration a significant legal victory this week, reversing a lower court order that had blocked the government from terminating Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Ethiopian nationals. The ruling lands just days after two Biden-appointed judges in Massachusetts tried to freeze the administration's TPS revocations, and it sharpens a growing conflict between the Supreme Court's recent directives and district judges who appear reluctant to follow them.
The decision reinforces a June 25 Supreme Court ruling in Mullin v. Doe, where a 6-3 majority held that lower courts generally lack jurisdiction to hear Administrative Procedure Act challenges to DHS decisions on TPS designations. That ruling was supposed to settle the question. Within days, two federal judges in the same Massachusetts district tested its limits.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, issued an administrative stay in African Communities Together v. Mullin, temporarily preserving TPS protections for roughly 26,700 Ethiopian nationals. Hours later, Senior U.S. District Judge Patti Saris issued a separate administrative stay halting the termination of TPS for South Sudanese nationals. Both orders came after the Supreme Court had explicitly narrowed the legal pathway for exactly this kind of challenge.
The appeals court reversal struck at the foundation of those stays, siding with the administration's position that DHS acted within its statutory authority when it determined Ethiopia no longer met the conditions for TPS designation.
The original TPS designation for Ethiopia came in December 2022, during the Biden administration, in response to severe drought and armed conflict. It was renewed in mid-2024. The Trump administration's DHS concluded those conditions no longer justified the protection.
A DHS Federal Register notice spelled out the agency's reasoning plainly.
"The Secretary determined that Ethiopia no longer continues to meet the conditions for the designation for Temporary Protected Status."
The revocation affects approximately 4,500 Ethiopian immigrants who will lose work authorization and must leave the United States by mid-February. The move follows a similar TPS termination for Burma in November, as the Washington Examiner reported, signaling a broader and deliberate policy shift rather than a one-off decision.
The administration has made clear it views TPS as a temporary measure that previous administrations allowed to calcify into a permanent residency workaround. Under that theory, rolling back expired or outdated designations is not just permitted but required by the statute's plain text.
The back-and-forth between district judges and the Supreme Court has drawn sharp responses from conservative legal figures. Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, did not hold back about the lower court stays.
"These Democrat operatives in robes do not have the power to do this. The Supreme Court just made that crystal clear. So it's time to ignore these clearly lawless orders."
Davis's framing captures a frustration that has been building among conservatives for months: that certain district judges are treating Supreme Court rulings as suggestions rather than binding law. The Mullin v. Doe decision was supposed to foreclose APA-based challenges to TPS terminations. The majority left open only a narrow window for constitutional claims to proceed. Yet within hours, two judges found procedural tools to freeze the government's action anyway.
That pattern of lower court resistance to federal enforcement authority has played out in other arenas as well. Senator John Fetterman recently warned that elected officials who vow to defy Supreme Court TPS rulings risk triggering a constitutional crisis.
Judge Murphy's decision to issue the stay drew added scrutiny because of his history with immigration enforcement cases. DHS General Counsel James Percival pointed to a prior incident involving Murphy in comments that underscored the administration's frustration with the judiciary.
"Remember when that district judge rerouted a plane with child rapists headed for South Sudan? The judge made ICE land in Djibouti to face Malaria and terrorist rocket attacks from Yemen."
Percival's account, as Fox News detailed, paints a picture of a judge whose interventions in immigration enforcement have gone well beyond standard injunctive relief. Rerouting a deportation flight mid-air raises serious questions about judicial overreach into operational decisions that fall squarely within the executive branch's domain.
The tension between federal judges and immigration authorities is not confined to courtrooms. In New York, ICE Director Tom Homan warned city officials that attempts to obstruct federal enforcement would be met with an unprecedented surge of agents.
The legal architecture here matters. In Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruled that the Immigration and Nationality Act channels TPS challenges through specific statutory provisions, not through the broad review mechanisms of the Administrative Procedure Act. The 6-3 split fell along ideological lines, with the conservative majority holding that Congress designed TPS as a discretionary executive tool with limited judicial review.
The majority opinion left one door ajar: constitutional claims, as distinct from statutory ones, might still be heard. That narrow exception is what the district judges seized on. Whether their stays can survive appellate review on that basis remains an open question, but the appeals court's reversal this week suggests the higher courts are not inclined to let the exception swallow the rule.
For the administration, the legal stakes extend far beyond Ethiopia. TPS designations currently cover nationals from more than a dozen countries. If district judges can effectively nullify termination decisions through administrative stays despite the Supreme Court's ruling, the executive branch's authority over immigration enforcement shrinks to whatever a single federal judge in a friendly jurisdiction will allow.
Local officials in several cities have also pushed back against federal immigration enforcement. Critics have blasted some of these efforts as legal fantasy, arguing that local authorities lack the power to override federal jurisdiction on immigration or foreign policy matters.
The appeals court ruling does not end the litigation. Plaintiffs challenging the TPS termination will likely seek en banc review or attempt to reframe their claims under the constitutional exception the Supreme Court left open. The administration, meanwhile, has signaled it will continue rolling back TPS designations it considers outdated.
The roughly 4,500 Ethiopians directly affected face a mid-February deadline to leave the country or adjust their immigration status through other legal channels. Advocacy groups have argued the termination will uproot families and workers who have built lives in the United States over the past two years. The administration counters that TPS was never intended to function as a pathway to permanent residency and that the statutory conditions that justified the original designation no longer exist.
The broader pattern of confrontation between city and state officials and federal authority on immigration continues to escalate. Some local administrations have drawn bipartisan backlash for actions that critics say prioritize political posturing over legal authority.
Investigators and litigants on both sides will need to determine whether the constitutional claims exception can sustain future challenges, or whether the Supreme Court will need to close that door as well.
When the Supreme Court speaks 6-3 and district judges respond within hours by freezing the very actions the ruling authorized, the question stops being about immigration policy. It becomes about whether the judiciary still operates as a hierarchy or as a collection of independent fiefdoms. The appeals court just reminded everyone which way the system is supposed to work.
