OBAMA JUDGE REVERSES AND HANDS TRUMP AMAZING WIN – ILHAN OMAR IS LIVID
Judge Clears Trump to End Somalia TPS—But the Ruling Is About Judicial Review, Not a Finding That Somalia Is Safe
A federal judge has removed one of the last court barriers preventing the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals in the United States.
That is a significant legal win for the administration.
But the reason for the win is narrower than some of the political headlines surrounding it.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs did not rule that Somalia is safe, nor did she conclude that the people challenging the policy would suffer little harm if their protections disappear.
In fact, she found almost the opposite on the question of harm.
What changed was the law governing how much room a lower federal court has to stop the Department of Homeland Security from terminating a country’s Temporary Protected Status designation.
Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, on Friday lifted the administrative stay that had kept Somalia’s TPS termination from taking effect while the litigation continued.
The decision allows DHS to implement the termination and removes the temporary protection from removal and employment authorization that comes specifically from Somalia’s TPS designation.
For people whose ability to remain and work in the United States depends only on TPS, the consequences can be immediate and serious.
But losing TPS is not the same thing as receiving an automatic deportation order.
Some affected people may have asylum claims, family-based cases, another immigration status or some other form of relief. Others may become subject to detention or removal proceedings once TPS no longer protects them.
That distinction matters because the legal ruling changes the availability of one humanitarian protection; it does not determine every individual immigration case at once.
The dispute began with a decision made months earlier.
Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in January that DHS would terminate Somalia’s TPS designation, saying country conditions had improved enough that the statutory requirements were no longer satisfied.
The formal Federal Register notice was published Jan. 14 and set the termination for March 17, 2026.
DHS estimated at the time that 1,082 people held approved Somalia TPS and another 1,383 applications were pending as of December 2025.
Somalia has been covered by TPS since 1991, making it one of the program’s longest-running designations.
Congress created TPS to allow eligible nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, environmental disaster or other extraordinary and temporary conditions to remain in the United States for limited periods when return would be unsafe or impracticable.
TPS can provide protection from removal and permission to work, but it does not itself create a path to permanent residence or citizenship.
Successive administrations repeatedly extended Somalia’s designation as conflict, terrorism and humanitarian instability continued.
The Trump administration took a different view and concluded that the designation should end.
Four Somali nationals and two advocacy organizations challenged that decision in federal court in Massachusetts on March 9.
They argued, among other things, that the termination was procedurally unlawful and that the administration’s decision was driven by racial and national-origin discrimination rather than a neutral assessment of conditions in Somalia.
Four days later, Burroughs entered an administrative stay preventing the termination from taking effect while the parties developed the record and briefed the dispute.
That March order is important to understand because it was temporary by design.
It was not a final judgment declaring the administration’s policy unlawful.
Burroughs was preserving the status quo while she considered whether the plaintiffs were entitled to longer-term relief.
That is why describing Friday’s action simply as an Obama-appointed judge suddenly 'reversing herself' leaves out the central procedural history.
The legal landscape changed in June, when the Supreme Court decided Mullin v. Doe, consolidated with Trump v. Miot.
Those cases involved the administration’s termination of TPS for Syria and Haiti.
By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court held that the TPS statute bars judicial review of nonconstitutional claims challenging DHS determinations to designate, extend or terminate a country’s TPS status.
The ruling swept broadly enough to cover not only objections to the final termination decision but also statutory and Administrative Procedure Act arguments attacking the process that led to it.
That alone dramatically narrowed the types of claims the Somali plaintiffs could use to keep their protection in place.
The Supreme Court also addressed an equal-protection claim involving Haiti.
The Haitian plaintiffs had argued that racial discrimination motivated the administration’s termination decision and cited statements by President Trump and administration officials as evidence.
The Supreme Court assumed for purposes of its analysis that the ordinary discriminatory-purpose framework applied but concluded that the plaintiffs were unlikely to prove that race was a motivating factor in Haiti’s termination.
That part of Mullin became especially important in the Somalia case because the Somali plaintiffs were making a similar constitutional argument.
They pointed to Trump’s repeated attacks on Somali immigrants and the Somali community, including comments that they said demonstrated racial and national-origin hostility.
Burroughs did not dismiss the severity of that evidence.
In Friday’s ruling, she said the plaintiffs had presented a strong case that the statements at issue were racist and that the surrounding evidence showed Somalia and Somali people were being targeted.
But she also concluded that the Supreme Court’s treatment of the comparable race-discrimination claim in Mullin left her without a viable path to find that the Somalia plaintiffs were likely to succeed on that theory.
That is the central reason the administration prevailed.
To obtain preliminary relief, plaintiffs generally must show, among other things, a likelihood of success on the merits of their legal claims.
Burroughs concluded they could not satisfy that requirement after Mullin.
At the same time, she found that the other practical considerations leaned heavily in the plaintiffs’ direction.
She wrote that they had made a 'convincing showing' of irreparable harm if an injunction were denied.
She also found that the balance of hardships and the public interest favored them because the government had not shown that keeping TPS in place during the litigation would impose an undue burden.
Those findings make Friday’s order more complicated than a simple judicial endorsement of the administration’s underlying policy.
The judge essentially concluded that the plaintiffs faced serious consequences and had strong equitable arguments, but Supreme Court precedent made it unlikely they could win the legal claims needed to justify continued interim relief.
The distinction is especially important when evaluating claims about conditions in Somalia.
DHS has said conditions improved enough that Somalia no longer satisfies the legal requirements for TPS.
The plaintiffs dispute that conclusion and point to continuing conflict, al-Shabaab violence and the U.S. government’s own warnings about travel to Somalia.
Friday’s ruling does not settle that factual disagreement by independently finding Somalia safe.
Mullin instead sharply limits the judiciary’s ability to review the Secretary’s statutory TPS determination in the first place.
In other words, the administration’s court victory is largely about who gets to decide and who is allowed to review the decision.
That is a separation-of-powers and statutory-jurisdiction question as much as it is an immigration-policy dispute.
The case also shows how quickly one Supreme Court decision can reshape related litigation around the country.
Since Mullin, the Trump administration has used the ruling to defend TPS terminations involving several nationalities.
Reuters reported Friday that judges had also recently allowed TPS terminations for South Sudan and Myanmar to move forward, while litigation over Ethiopia remained an exception.
The Somalia case followed the same pattern: the district court initially preserved the protection, then had to reassess the plaintiffs’ chances after the Supreme Court narrowed the available legal theories.
The First Circuit became involved as the government challenged the continuing administrative stay, adding another layer of procedural litigation before the matter returned to Burroughs for the ruling issued Friday.
The result is a genuine victory for President Trump’s immigration agenda.
It means the federal government is no longer restrained by Burroughs’ stay from carrying out the Somalia TPS termination.
But it should not be confused with a ruling that every Somali TPS holder entered the country illegally, committed fraud or lacks another lawful basis to remain.
TPS beneficiaries can include people who entered the United States in different ways and whose immigration histories vary substantially.
The termination also does not directly affect the vast majority of Somali Americans who are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents and therefore do not depend on TPS.
That point is relevant because some political coverage has blurred the relatively small TPS population with the much larger Somali American community, particularly in Minnesota.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who came to the United States as a Somali refugee and later became a U.S. citizen, has repeatedly criticized Trump’s rhetoric and previous efforts to end Somalia TPS.
But a viral graphic circulating with the latest court story goes further, claiming that Omar is 'livid' about Burroughs’ Friday ruling.
There is a problem with that claim: as of the publication of this article, no contemporaneous public statement from Omar reacting to Friday’s order could be independently verified.
Her prior opposition to the administration’s Somalia policy is well documented.
That is not the same thing as evidence that she issued a new reaction to this specific ruling.
The same caution applies to Trump’s rhetoric about Somali fraud cases in Minnesota.
Federal and state authorities have pursued major fraud prosecutions involving some defendants from Minnesota’s Somali community, and Trump has repeatedly used those cases when attacking Somali immigration and Omar.
But criminal allegations against particular individuals do not establish wrongdoing by Somali TPS holders as a group.
The TPS case turns on DHS’s country designation, the statutory limits on judicial review and the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims—not on whether an entire ethnic community can be associated with unrelated criminal cases.
There is another reason Friday’s ruling should not be described as the final end of the legal dispute.
Burroughs denied the request to keep the termination blocked and lifted the administrative stay, but the underlying lawsuit has not necessarily vanished merely because interim relief was denied.
The immediate practical question, however, is no longer theoretical.
USCIS now lists Somalia’s TPS designation as terminated effective Aug. 14, 2026.
People who relied solely on that designation can lose TPS-based work authorization and protection from removal, subject to the details of their individual immigration situations and any other relief available to them.
For the Trump administration, that is the concrete policy result it sought.
For the plaintiffs, the most striking part of the ruling may be that the judge accepted much of their argument about harm while concluding that Supreme Court precedent prevented her from giving them the remedy they wanted.
So Friday’s order settles one immediate question: the Massachusetts administrative stay will no longer prevent DHS from ending Somalia’s TPS designation.
What it does not settle is whether Somalia is objectively safe, whether the administration’s broader rhetoric about Somalis is justified, or whether every affected person will ultimately be removed from the United States.
And it does not support a separate viral claim that Ilhan Omar publicly erupted over the decision unless and until there is an actual statement showing that she did.
The most important legal takeaway is narrower and more consequential.
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After Mullin v. Doe, lower courts have far less authority to second-guess DHS decisions ending Temporary Protected Status, and constitutional challenges based on discriminatory purpose now face a much steeper path as well.
That change in the law—not a sudden factual finding about Somalia—is what turned the administration’s temporary setback in Massachusetts into a victory on Friday.
