The Trump administration scored another big win at the appellate court level on Monday, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of a lower court ruling vacating Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations for Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
A win for the rule of law and vindication for the US Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation.
— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) February 9, 2026
TPS was never designed to be permanent, yet… pic.twitter.com/SZhVNuhU1n
Multiple TPS cases are being litigated at present, and it's a bit challenging to keep them all straight, but this one, as noted, involves TPS designations for Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Sec. Noem terminated the TPS designations for all three countries in the summer of 2025. The plaintiffs sued to block that termination, and in late December, District Judge Trina Thompson (Northern District of California) determined that Noem's decisions violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and entered a judgment vacating the terminations.
The administration appealed and, with Monday's ruling (viewable below), the 9th Circuit not only granted a stay pending appeal but struck at the very heart of a number of related rulings:
We conclude that the government is likely to succeed on the merits of its appeal either by showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction or by prevailing on plaintiffs’ arbitrary-and-capricious APA challenge.
Shocker. Ninth Circuit Squashes Unhinged Ranting Opinion by Leftist Judge
The court distinguished this case, involving the termination of TPS, from its recent ruling in a case involving Noem's vacatur of a TPS designation, which found that she had exceeded her statutory authority. To put it simply, per the 9th Circuit, the applicable statute allows the DHS Secretary to terminate TPS designations, just not to vacate them.
The court also found it likely that the administration will succeed on the merits of the APA claim, though one of the panel judges (Michael Hawkins, a Clinton appointee) felt it unnecessary to address the merits of the APA claim, though he agreed with the decision to grant the stay. (The other two panel judges, Consuello Callahan and Eric Miller, were appointed by Bush 43 and Trump, respectively.)
Of note, the court also pointed to recent Supreme Court stays issued in related cases as further support for its decision:
We are not writing on a blank slate, however, because the Supreme Court has twice stayed district court orders blocking the Secretary’s vacatur of TPS for Venezuela. See Noem v. National TPS All., 146 S. Ct. 23 (2025); Noem v. National TPS All., 145 S. Ct. 2728 (2025). Those orders contained no reasoning, so they do not inform our analysis of the legal issues in this case, and the issues in any event are not identical. But the stay applications involved similar assertions of harm by both parties, and we have been admonished that the Court’s stay orders must inform “how [we] should exercise [our] equitable discretion in like cases.” Trump v. Boyle, 145 S. Ct. 2653, 2654 (2025). We therefore conclude that the equitable factors favor a stay.
Plaintiffs, of course, may petition for a rehearing en banc, and there may be an appeal to the Supreme Court, but if they're banking on a win at SCOTUS, they may be out of luck.
TPS Decision 2-9-26 by Susie Moore
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