'Leave NOW': Judge Lifts 'Last Block' on Trump's TPS Terminations

The Trump administration scored a major win Tuesday as the last remaining court order blocking its TPS terminations was lifted.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy lifted his administrative stay blocking the termination of Ethiopia's Temporary Protected Status designation, allowing the Trump administration's decision to take effect.

🚨 A federal judge has lifted his order that blocked the termination of Ethiopia’s Temporary Protected Status, but he will allow a challenge alleging racial or national-origin discrimination in the termination decision to proceed. pic.twitter.com/fNO2JVC4Ja
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) August 18, 2026

The Massachusetts federal judge dismissed nearly all of the remaining claims brought by African Communities Together and several Ethiopian TPS recipients, including their arguments that Homeland Security Sec. Markwayne Mullin lacked the authority to terminate TPS and that the administration violated their procedural due-process rights.

As reported by Insider Wire, after the lifting of blocks on TPS status changes, over one million immigrants are now potentially subject to deportation.

"Over a million immigrants have lost their Temporary Protected Status after a federal judge lifted the last remaining block to the Trump administration's terminations," it stated.

DHS alerted the TPS recipients that they should now begin self-deportation.

ALL TPS terminations are now IN EFFECT.

Those with terminated TPS should leave NOW. If they don’t, we will DEPORT them. https://t.co/Pahpi5pL2Z https://t.co/TsECd5kd7z
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 18, 2026

"ALL TPS terminations are now IN EFFECT," DHS said on X. "Those with terminated TPS should leave NOW. If they don’t, we will DEPORT them."

But unlike a similar ruling involving Somalia last week, this one comes with a “catch.” Murphy, a Biden appointee, allowed one claim to continue: The plaintiffs' allegation that the Trump administration's decision was motivated by racial or national-origin discrimination.

So the deportation shield is coming down. The racial discrimination lawsuit, however, lives to fight another day.

The dispute dates back to December, when the Dept. of Homeland Security terminated Ethiopia's TPS designation, effective February 13. Ethiopia had initially received TPS under the Biden administration in 2022 amid armed conflict, displacement and humanitarian problems in the country.

Murphy initially postponed the termination in April after finding the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on claims that DHS had failed to properly consult other agencies and that its stated reasons for ending TPS were pretextual.

Then the Supreme Court intervened. In Mullin v. Doe, the high court ruled in June that the TPS statute's judicial-review provision bars non-constitutional challenges to decisions involving TPS designations. The Supreme Court also concluded that plaintiffs in the related litigation were unlikely to prevail on their equal-protection claim.

That decision substantially changed the legal landscape, and the First Circuit subsequently reversed Murphy's April order and sent the Ethiopia case back to him.

The plaintiffs tried another route, adding claims that the DHS secretary lacked legal authority to terminate TPS and that ending the program violated procedural due process.

Neither worked. On the first argument, Murphy sided with the government and other courts that have recently considered the question, concluding that authority over TPS was transferred from the Attorney General to the Homeland Security Secretary when Congress created DHS.

The due-process theory didn't fare any better. Even assuming TPS recipients have protected interests in their work authorization and protection from removal, Murphy concluded that terminating Ethiopia's designation is a program-wide government action rather than an ‘individualized adjudication.’

The court ruled that such generally applicable action requires only minimal process, and dismissed the claim.

In other words, the “T” in “TPS” means “temporary.” Judges are finally catching on. The government isn't constitutionally required to keep extending it simply because recipients benefit from it.

But then we get to the part of the lawsuit that Murphy wasn't willing to throw out.

The plaintiffs claim the administration terminated Ethiopia's TPS designation because of racial or national-origin animus. The government asked Murphy to dismiss that claim as well, pointing to the Supreme Court's treatment of a similar argument in Mullin. Murphy declined.

"Certainly, the Supreme Court found the plaintiffs unlikely to prevail on a similar equal protection claim in Mullin," he wrote.

But Murphy drew a distinction between determining whether plaintiffs are likely to win — the standard for preliminary relief — and determining whether their allegations are sufficiently plausible to survive a motion to dismiss.

"The Supreme Court did not decide that the plaintiffs had failed to state a plausible claim for relief," the decision states. "It is hard to say that the statements here are not enough to get past the motion to dismiss stage and provide the plaintiffs with at least an opportunity to prove their case through discovery."

Murphy therefore ruled that the plaintiffs can pursue discovery in an attempt to establish discriminatory intent. That's an important distinction from the Somalia TPS ruling.

In that case, Obama-appointed Judge Allison Burroughs, who was threatened with impeachment over the stay, refused to continue blocking the administration's termination. She concluded that Mullin left the Somali plaintiffs without a likely path to success on their race-discrimination theory.

Here, Murphy isn't saying the Ethiopian plaintiffs are likely to prove racial discrimination. He's saying the claim clears the considerably lower threshold required to survive dismissal.

That means the administration can proceed with terminating TPS while the plaintiffs continue digging through discovery for evidence to support their allegations.

Bottom line: The Trump administration can end Ethiopia's TPS designation. But the lawsuit over whether it did so for discriminatory reasons will continue.

Because a U.S. president apparently cannot just decide that conditions in a country no longer warrant temporary protected status without being second-guessed by an activist judge.

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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