Federal judges in Boston and Chicago handed the Trump administration two more courtroom victories on its push to end Temporary Protected Status for foreign nationals, leaving only two countries' designations still blocked by judicial order.

The twin rulings, issued Friday, allow the Department of Homeland Security to move forward with terminating deportation protections for nationals of South Sudan and Burma. In Boston, U.S. District Judge Patti Saris lifted her previous order blocking TPS termination for South Sudan. In Chicago, a federal judge cleared the way for DHS to end protections for roughly 3,700 Burmese nationals. DHS General Counsel James Percival announced the wins in a post on X, calling the decisions part of a broader pattern of courts recognizing the administration's authority over immigration enforcement.

The rulings mark the latest in a string of legal victories that have steadily dismantled the judicial roadblocks immigration activists erected against the administration's TPS agenda. As of August 7, DHS has successfully ended TPS designations for nationals from eleven countries: Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, South Sudan, and Burma. Only Ethiopia and Somalia remain shielded by active court orders.

Supreme Court's June decision broke the dam

The administration's momentum traces back to a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in June that sharply limited lower courts' ability to block TPS terminations. That decision, rooted in the cases Noem v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, effectively told district judges across the country to stop second-guessing the executive branch on a program Congress designed to be temporary. The high court had accepted the administration's expedited appeal in March and heard oral arguments in April, a pace that signaled the justices recognized the urgency of the question.

Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, described the pre-ruling landscape bluntly:

"Activist judges have been defying the Trump administration and making temporary protected status all but permanent."

Judge Saris's decision to lift her own injunction in the South Sudan case is a concrete example of how the Supreme Court ruling changed the calculus. The Washington Examiner reported that Saris's reversal affects over 232 current South Sudanese TPS holders and 73 pending applicants, a modest number, but a symbolically important one. Every country removed from the blocked list narrows the legal ground available to opponents of the administration's enforcement push.

Percival framed the stakes in direct terms.

"Every day these administrative stays are in effect is a day the American people are denied what they voted for."

More than one million migrants face the end of protections

The numbers involved are substantial. Across all terminated designations, more than one million migrants are covered by the TPS programs DHS has moved to end. The largest groups include roughly 618,000 Venezuelans, approximately 350,000 Haitians, around 72,000 Hondurans, some 13,000 Nepalis, and about 12,000 Afghans. Thousands more from Syria, Yemen, Cameroon, Nicaragua, and South Sudan round out the total.

Those figures represent the accumulated result of years of TPS expansions under prior administrations. A Senate investigation found that the Biden White House laid internal groundwork for TPS expansion covering as many as three million noncitizens, a scale that turned what Congress intended as emergency, time-limited relief into something closer to a permanent residency program administered by executive fiat.

DHS has been explicit about the principle at stake. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin put it plainly when the South Sudan case was still being litigated:

"TPS was never designed to be permanent."

That argument, that temporary means temporary, is the administration's core legal and political position. And the courts have now validated it for eleven of the thirteen countries where DHS sought to act.

Opponents called the push racially motivated, courts disagreed

The legal challenges to TPS terminations did not rest solely on procedural grounds. Civil rights groups argued the revocations were racially motivated and violated administrative procedure. Dorian Spence, a litigation coordinator for Communities United for Status and Protection, cast the effort in stark terms during earlier litigation over the South Sudan designation:

"This is only one prong in their multi-pronged attack into making America whiter."

That framing did not persuade the courts. Judge after judge, culminating in the Supreme Court's June ruling, concluded that the executive branch holds the authority to end TPS designations, and that lower courts had overstepped by blocking those decisions.

Earlier in the litigation, a district judge had temporarily halted the South Sudan termination, citing "legally complex" issues with "serious, long-term consequences, including the risk of deadly harm." Fox News reported that McLaughlin called that initial block "yet another lawless and activist order from the federal judiciary who continues to usurp the President's constitutional authority."

The administration's position was that conditions in South Sudan had improved enough to justify ending protections, and that the legal framework gave DHS clear discretion. Friday's ruling in Boston confirmed that view.

Ethiopia and Somalia remain the last holdouts

With South Sudan and Burma now cleared, only two countries' TPS designations remain blocked by court orders: Ethiopia and Somalia. The specific case names and judges involved in those remaining injunctions are not publicly detailed in the latest filings, but the pattern suggests those blocks face the same legal headwinds that collapsed in the South Sudan and Burma cases.

The Supreme Court's June framework gives the administration a strong hand. Lower courts that issued broad injunctions before that ruling now face a legal landscape that has shifted decisively in the executive branch's favor. Judges who once felt comfortable halting TPS terminations must now contend with a high court majority that said, in effect, the president has this power and you do not get to override it.

Immigration enforcement has been a central battleground between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary since 2025. A Rhode Island federal judge overturned Trump immigration policies covering nearly forty countries earlier in this cycle, a sweeping order that the Supreme Court's subsequent rulings have effectively undercut.

What remains unanswered

Several practical questions remain open. DHS has not publicly detailed when removal proceedings will begin for nationals whose TPS has been terminated, or how many individuals covered by ended designations have already left the country voluntarily. The agency has also not broken out individual figures for every affected nationality, the totals for Syria, Yemen, Cameroon, Nicaragua, and South Sudan are grouped under a general "thousands" description rather than precise counts.

The political landscape around immigration enforcement continues to shift. In New York, Brad Lander ousted Dan Goldman in a Democratic primary where immigration policy and the future of agencies like ICE were central issues, a sign that even within the Democratic Party, the politics of enforcement and amnesty are far from settled.

But in the courts, the trajectory is clear. Eleven countries down. Two to go. And a Supreme Court majority that has told the lower bench to stop treating a temporary program as a permanent entitlement.

Congress called it Temporary Protected Status for a reason. The courts are finally holding the government to the plain meaning of the word.