🚨 JUST IN: TRUMP SCORES HUGE LEGAL WIN — WHAT HAPPENS NEXT COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING
JUST IN: Trump Scores Major Legal Victory as Final Ethiopia TPS Block Falls - But One Constitutional Claim Survives
A Boston federal judge has cleared the way for the administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than 5,000 Ethiopians. The decisive change was not a new finding that DHS handled the program correctly; it was a Supreme Court ruling that sharply restricted judicial review of TPS termination decisions.
The last injunction fell - and the administration immediately declared victory
President Donald Trump's immigration agenda picked up another significant courtroom win on August 18.
U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston lifted the remaining judicial block preventing the Department of Homeland Security from putting its termination of Ethiopia's Temporary Protected Status designation into effect.
DHS estimated in its termination notice that 5,001 people held approved Ethiopia TPS, with another 263 applications pending as of November 10, 2025.
Within hours of the ruling, DHS General Counsel James Percival celebrated publicly.
"All TPS terminations are in effect!" he wrote.
That statement captures the practical result.
It does not capture the legal path that produced it.
Murphy had previously concluded that the Ethiopian plaintiffs were likely to succeed on serious procedural challenges to the termination and that the government's stated reasoning appeared preordained and pretextual.
What changed was not Murphy's assessment of those facts.
What changed was the law governing whether a federal court is allowed to review those claims at all.
The victory is real - but it is primarily a victory over judicial review
The Trump administration can fairly call this a major legal victory.
The order removes the final injunction that had kept Ethiopia TPS alive after its announced termination date.
But saying the court has now found that DHS's original process was flawless would be inaccurate.
The decisive precedent came from the Supreme Court on June 25 in Mullin v. Doe, a consolidated dispute involving TPS terminations for Syria and Haiti.
By a 6-3 judgment, the Court held that the TPS statute bars judicial review of all non-constitutional claims challenging the Homeland Security secretary's determination to designate, extend or terminate a country's TPS status.
That holding reached procedural objections as well as substantive ones.
In other words, plaintiffs generally cannot avoid the statutory review bar by arguing that DHS consulted the wrong agencies, used defective procedures, relied on a pretext or made an arbitrary decision under the Administrative Procedure Act.
The Court read Congress's words - "no judicial review" - broadly.
Once that interpretation became controlling law, the legal foundation supporting Murphy's April postponement order collapsed.
The First Circuit had already told Murphy what had to happen
The August 18 ruling did not arrive in isolation.
The Trump administration appealed Murphy's April order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
After the Supreme Court decided Mullin, the First Circuit summarily reversed Murphy's postponement order on July 29.
The appeals court quoted the Supreme Court's holding that the TPS statute's judicial-review bar applies to all non-constitutional claims.
It then observed that those non-constitutional claims were the only basis for the April postponement order.
The case was sent back to Murphy for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court's decision.
That procedural history matters because it prevents a misleading interpretation of Tuesday's result.
Murphy did not independently revisit the same APA claims and suddenly conclude that he had been wrong in April.
A higher court removed the legal authority for the relief he had granted.
In April, Murphy had sharply criticized DHS's handling of Ethiopia
The contrast with the earlier ruling is striking.
Ethiopia was first designated for TPS by the Biden administration in December 2022, after armed conflict, mass displacement and humanitarian crises made safe return difficult.
DHS extended and redesignated Ethiopia in 2024, allowing the protection to continue through December 12, 2025.
The Trump administration announced the termination on December 15, 2025, with an effective date of February 13, 2026.
The Federal Register notice said violence had decreased and country conditions had improved sufficiently for nationals to return safely, while also citing national-interest considerations.
Ethiopian TPS holders and African Communities Together challenged that decision in federal court.
On April 8, Murphy granted their request to postpone the termination.
He found the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on a claim that DHS had not conducted the meaningful interagency consultation required by the TPS statute.
He also found they were likely to show that the outcome had been preordained and that the stated explanation was pretextual.
Those were preliminary findings made while deciding interim relief, not final judgments after trial.
But they were serious findings nonetheless.
The Supreme Court did not say agencies are free to ignore the law
The breadth of Mullin can sound startling.
If a federal court cannot review many statutory and procedural objections to a TPS termination, does that mean the Homeland Security secretary can simply ignore Congress?
The Supreme Court majority rejected that characterization.
Justice Samuel Alito's opinion said the statutory bar means Congress chose not to make federal courts the forum for reviewing these determinations.
The majority noted that Congress retains political tools - including appropriations and legislation - to respond to abuses.
The Court nevertheless acknowledged the consequence of its interpretation: even claims alleging serious procedural defects can fall within the review bar.
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.
The dissent argued that Congress barred review of the secretary's TPS determination itself, not every legally required procedural step leading to that determination.
That disagreement is now one of the most consequential legal rules shaping Trump's effort to unwind TPS designations.
One constitutional claim is still alive
The Ethiopia case is not completely over.
Murphy has allowed the plaintiffs to continue pursuing a Fifth Amendment claim alleging that the termination was motivated by racial or national-origin bias.
That distinction exists because the Supreme Court's clearest holding in Mullin was that the statute bars non-constitutional claims.
The Supreme Court also considered an equal-protection challenge involving Haiti and concluded that those plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed in obtaining interim relief.
But the Court did not announce a blanket rule that every future constitutional challenge to every TPS termination automatically fails.
Constitutional claims are fact-sensitive, and the Ethiopia plaintiffs may try to build a record specific to their case.
That means the surviving Fifth Amendment claim can continue even though it no longer keeps Ethiopia TPS in force.
For the administration, that is the crucial practical victory.
Litigation survives, but the injunction does not.
The plaintiffs' surviving theory is politically explosive - and legally difficult
The challengers argue that the administration has disproportionately targeted TPS programs covering migrants from non-white and non-European countries and that racial or national-origin bias influenced the Ethiopia decision.
The administration denies that accusation.
It says the policy is driven by a fundamentally different view of a program Congress explicitly called temporary.
That argument received important support from the Supreme Court's treatment of the Haiti challenge.
In Mullin, the majority noted that the administration had terminated every TPS designation that had come up for renewal and said that broad opposition to the way TPS had been implemented supplied a race-neutral explanation for the policy.
The Court also concluded that the statements cited in the Haiti litigation were insufficient, at the interim stage, to show race was a motivating factor.
The Ethiopia plaintiffs therefore face a difficult precedent.
But because their constitutional claim remains pending, it would still be premature to say the entire lawsuit has been finally decided in Trump's favor.
Ending TPS does not mean every Ethiopian beneficiary is automatically deported the next morning
The practical consequences also require precision.
TPS provides two central benefits to eligible beneficiaries: temporary protection from removal based on TPS and authorization to work in the United States.
With Ethiopia's designation no longer judicially postponed, those TPS-based protections can end in accordance with the termination.
But immigration cases are individual.
Some Ethiopian TPS holders may separately possess another lawful immigration status, have pending asylum claims, qualify for other relief or face additional immigration proceedings before removal.
So the ruling does not mean that more than 5,000 people are all instantly placed on the same deportation timetable.
It means Ethiopia TPS itself is no longer the legal shield keeping eligible beneficiaries protected from removal and authorized to work.
That difference is important both legally and practically.
The Ethiopia case is part of a much larger collapse of TPS injunctions
Tuesday's result also matters because Ethiopia had become the last prominent TPS termination still protected by a district-court postponement after a string of government victories.
In recent weeks, federal courts have cleared the way for the administration to terminate TPS for migrants from South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia.
Those rulings followed the same basic shock wave from Mullin.
Courts that had previously entertained Administrative Procedure Act challenges now have far less room to review the secretary's TPS termination decisions.
The Supreme Court's June ruling had already allowed the Haiti and Syria terminations to proceed.
By August 18, Percival could publicly declare that every TPS termination challenged in this wave was in effect.
That is a far more consequential statement than a victory in one Boston courtroom.
It signals that the administration has largely dismantled the judicial barrier that had slowed its country-by-country rollback of the program.
TPS was always temporary in law - but often long-lasting in practice
The policy debate exists because the legal design and political reality of TPS have often diverged.
Congress created the program in 1990 for nationals already present in the United States who could not safely return home because of armed conflict, environmental disaster or other extraordinary and temporary conditions.
A designation does not itself create permanent resident status or a path to citizenship.
But some country designations have been repeatedly extended for many years or even decades as unsafe conditions persisted.
Trump officials argue that this history transformed a temporary humanitarian mechanism into something functionally semi-permanent.
Immigrant-rights groups answer that repeated extensions reflect repeated findings that the countries remain unsafe, not abuse by beneficiaries.
The Ethiopia dispute fits squarely inside that larger conflict.
DHS says conditions improved enough to end the designation.
The plaintiffs say armed conflict, displacement and humanitarian danger remain severe enough that return cannot be considered broadly safe.
After Mullin, federal judges have much less authority to resolve that disagreement through ordinary APA review.
This is a Supreme Court victory flowing downhill
The most accurate way to understand Trump's Tuesday win is as the downstream effect of a Supreme Court decision.
Murphy's April order had been one of the stronger lower-court rebukes of DHS's TPS process.
The administration did not defeat that order by persuading Murphy that the country conditions had been correctly assessed.
It defeated the order by winning a broader statutory interpretation at the Supreme Court and then using that precedent in the First Circuit.
The appellate court reversed.
Murphy lifted the block.
Ethiopia TPS can now be terminated.
That sequence is important because it shows how one Supreme Court ruling can reshape dozens of lower-court immigration disputes at once.
The administration no longer has to win every factual argument about every country's conditions in every district court.
For most non-constitutional TPS claims, the threshold answer from the Supreme Court is that Congress did not authorize the courts to conduct that review.
Trump won the immediate fight. The remaining fight is narrower and harder.
For the White House, the immediate objective is accomplished.
More than 5,000 Ethiopian TPS beneficiaries no longer have a court order preserving the country's designation.
For DHS, the broader termination campaign is no longer restrained by the series of injunctions that had accumulated earlier in the year.
For the plaintiffs, the litigation has been reduced to a constitutional claim that does not currently stop the policy from taking effect.
That is why "major legal victory" is a fair description - as long as it is not confused with "the entire case is over."
Trump's administration won the question that matters most right now: whether it can implement the Ethiopia TPS termination while the lawsuit continues.
The answer is yes.
The next question is much narrower: whether the challengers can prove that the policy crossed a constitutional line even though the statute largely prevents courts from second-guessing the secretary's underlying TPS determination.
That fight remains.
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The deportation protection does not.
